How to handle Child Threads in Node.js ?
Last Updated :
10 Sep, 2021
Node.js is a single-threaded language and uses the multiple threads in the background for certain tasks as I/O calls but it does not expose child threads to the developer.
But node.js gives us ways to work around if we really need to do some work parallelly to our main single thread process.
Child Process in Node: The child_process module gives the node the ability to run the child process by accessing operating system commands.
Example: Filename: parallelProcess.js
javascript
console.log('Child Process Starts')
setTimeout(() => {
console.log('Data processed')
}, 5000)
|
Filename: main.js
javascript
const { fork } = require('child_process');
const child_process = fork('./parallelProcess.js');
const data = {}
console.log('Before process')
child_process.send({ data }, function(){
console.log('Sending data')
});
child_process.on('close', (result) => {
console.log('Child process terminated and returned');
});
console.log('After process')
|
Output:
Before process
After process
Child Process Starts
Data processed
Child process terminated and returned
Worker Threads The worker_threads module enables the use of threads that execute JavaScript in parallel. Worker’s threads are useful for performing CPU-intensive JavaScript operations. They will not help much with I/O-intensive work which can be done better using Node.js built-in asynchronous I/O operations.
Example:
javascript
const {Worker, isMainThread, parentPort}
= require('worker_threads');
if (isMainThread) {
const worker = new Worker(__filename, {
workerData: {}
});
worker.on('message', (m) => console.log(
'Thread send message:', m));
worker.on('error', () => console.log('Error'));
worker.on('exit', () => {
console.log('Worker exit')
});
} else {
setTimeout(() => {
parentPort.postMessage('Hello World!');
}, 3000)
}
|
Output:
Thread send message: Hello World!
Worker exit
The process has its own memory space on other hand, threads use the shared memory space. Thread is part of the process. Since worker_threads make new threads inside the same process it requires fewer resources.
Reference:
https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html
https://nodejs.org/api/worker_threads.html
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