GraalJS performance with yarn install

[kommen]

We're noticing a significant performance difference between stock nodejs and graal's nodejs when used with yarn.

with graal nodejs:

$ rm -rf node_modules
$ node --version:graalvm 
GraalVM Polyglot Engine Version 19.0.0
GraalVM Home /Users/kommen/Applications/graalvm-ce-19.0.0/Contents/Home
  Installed Languages:
    JavaScript version 19.0.0
    LLVM       version 19.0.0
  Installed Tools:
    CPU Sampler             version 0.4.0
    CPU Tracer              version 0.3.0
    Heap Allocation Monitor version 0.1.0
    Chrome Inspector        version 0.1
    Memory Tracer           version 0.2
$ time yarn install      
yarn install v1.16.0
[1/4] 🔍  Resolving packages...
[2/4] 🚚  Fetching packages...
[3/4] 🔗  Linking dependencies...
[4/4] 🔨  Building fresh packages...
✨  Done in 83.90s.
yarn install  177.77s user 23.90s system 235% cpu 1:25.74 total

With stock nodejs:

$ rm -rf node_modules
$ node --version
v12.1.0
$ time yarn install
yarn install v1.16.0
[1/4] 🔍  Resolving packages...
[2/4] 🚚  Fetching packages...
[3/4] 🔗  Linking dependencies...
[4/4] 🔨  Building fresh packages...
✨  Done in 7.05s.
yarn install  6.73s user 9.71s system 226% cpu 7.253 total

This is on an MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017) 2,8 GHz Intel Core i7.

These are the package.json and yarn.lock files I used to reproduce:
testcase.zip

[wirthi]

Hi @kommen

thanks for trying out GraalVM and our JavaScript/Node.js implementation. I am happy to see that, aside from performance, it is working for you.

We are aware that our implementation can sometimes be slower, especially around warmup. The difference to the original Node.js implementation should be much smaller (or even non-existent) for longer-running applications. Applications that run for a short time - like yarn or npm - are our worst-case scenario unfortunately. We are working on improvements in that area and try to be faster in future releases.
Thanks for providing your example files, we'll try to see if there is something in particular we can optimize for.

Best,
Christian

[geomagilles]

I confirm that - using yarn is painfully slow (minutes instead of seconds)