Node.js child process limits

Question

I know that node is a single threaded system and I was wondering if a child process uses its own thread or its parents. say for example I have an amd E-350 cpu with two threads. if I ran a node server that spawned ten child instances which all work continuously. would it allow it or would it fail as the hardware itself is not sufficient enough?

Answer 1

I can say from own experience that I successfully spawned 150 child processes inside an Amazon t2.micro with just one core.

The reason? I was DoS-ing myself for testing my core server's limits.

The attack stayed alive for 8 hours, until I gave up, but it could've been working for much longer.

My code was simply running an HTTP client pool and as soon as one request was done, another one spawned. This doesn't need a lot of CPU. It needs lots of network, though. Most of the time, the processes were just waiting for requests to finish.

However, in a high-concurrency application, the performance will be awful if you share memory between so many processes.