Node.js Event loop

Question

Is the Node.js I/O event loop single- or multithreaded?

If I have several I/O processes, node puts them in an external event loop. Are they processed in a sequence (fastest first) or handles the event loop to process them concurrently (...and in which limitations)?

Answer 1

Event Loop

The Node.js event loop runs under a single thread, this means the application code you write is evaluated on a single thread. Nodejs itself uses many threads underneath through libuv, but you never have to deal with with those when writing nodejs code.

Every call that involves I/O call requires you to register a callback. This call also returns immediately, this allows you to do multiple IO operations in parallel without using threads in your application code. As soon as an I/O operation is completed it's callback will be pushed on the event loop. It will be executed as soon as all the other callbacks that where pushed on the event loop before it are executed.

There are a few methods to do basic manipulation of how callbacks are added to the event loop. Usually you shouldn't need these, but every now and then they can be useful.

• setImmediate
• process.nextTick

At no point will there ever be two true parallel paths of execution, so all operations are inherently thread safe. There usually will be several asynchronous concurrent paths of execution that are being managed by the event loop.

Read More about the event loop

Limitations

Because of the event loop, node doesn't have to start a new thread for every incoming tcp connection. This allows node to service hundreds of thousands of requests concurrently , as long as you aren't calculating the first 1000 prime numbers for each request.

This also means it's important to not do CPU intensive operations, as these will keep a lock on the event loop and prevent other asynchronous paths of execution from continuing. It's also important to not use the sync variant of all the I/O methods, as these will keep a lock on the event loop as well.

If you want to do CPU heavy things you should ether delegate it to a different process that can execute the CPU bound operation more efficiently or you could write it as a node native add on.

Read more about use cases

Control Flow

In order to manage writing many callbacks you will probably want to use a control flow library. I believe this is currently the most popular callback based library:

• https://github.com/caolan/async

I've used callbacks and they pretty much drove me crazy, I've had much better experience using Promises, bluebird is a very popular and fast promise library:

• https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird

I've found this to be a pretty sensitive topic in the node community (callbacks vs promises), so by all means, use what you feel will work best for you personally. A good control flow library should also give you async stack traces, this is really important for debugging.

The Node.js process will finish when the last callback in the event loop finishes it's path of execution and doesn't register any other callbacks.

This is not a complete explanation, I advice you to check out the following thread, it's pretty up to date:

How do I get started with Node.js

Answer 2

From Willem's answer:

The Node.js event loop runs under a single thread. Every I/O call requires you to register a callback. Every I/O call also returns immediately, this allows you to do multiple IO operations in parallel without using threads.

I would like to start explaining with this above quote, which is one of the common misunderstandings of node js framework that I am seeing everywhere.

Node.js does not magically handle all those asynchronous calls with just one thread and still keep that thread unblocked. It internally uses google's V8 engine and a library called libuv(written in c++) that enables it to delegate some potential asynchronous work to other worker threads (kind of like a pool of threads waiting there for any work to be delegated from the master node thread). Then later when those threads finish their execution they call their callbacks and that is how the event loop is aware of the fact that the execution of a worker thread is completed.

The main point and advantage of nodejs is that you will never need to care about those internal threads and they will stay away from your code!. All the nasty sync stuff that should normally happen in multi threaded environments will be abstracted out by nodejs framework and you can happily work on your single thread (main node thread) in a more programmer friendly environment (while benefiting from all the performance enhancements of multiple threads).

Below is a good post if anyone is interested: When is the thread pool used?