Working with worker threads

JavaScript is a single-threaded programming language, meaning that it executes one task at a time within a process. Node.js also runs on a single thread, but it uses an event loop to handle asynchronous operations, enabling non-blocking I/O calls. Despite this, the event loop processes one task at a time. As a result, CPU-intensive tasks can block the event loop and degrade the overall performance of your application.

To handle CPU-intensive tasks in Node.js efficiently, you should consider using worker threads. Worker threads were declared stable in Node.js version 12 and later and are accessible through the core worker_threads core module. The worker threads API allows you to run JavaScript code in parallel across multiple threads, making it well-suited for CPU-intensive operations.

This tutorial will introduce the worker_threads module and demonstrate how to use it to manage CPU-intensive tasks.

Getting ready

First, ensure you’re using...