Performance of setTimeout in node?

Question

For my webapp I'm going to need to have many timeouts running at once at any given point, possibly around 10,000-100,000. What I'm wondering is how well this function scales.

I don't need it to be that accurate, mostly accurate within 10-100 ms. Would it be better to have a single function run on an interval (say, to run every 50 ms), that checks the current datetime compared to the saved datetime and invokes the function if so?

Does anyone have any insight in to the underlying implement of setTimeout and can shed some light as to how well it can be used en-masse?

More questions I had: Does anyone know of a limit to how many timeouts can be running at once? Also, with both approaches I'm concerned about there not being enough time to process each timeout per interval and it getting "behind" in terms of triggering the timeout function in time.

Answer 1

Actually you cannot determine the exact interval between timeouts, because all it does is it pushes your callback to the callback queue after the threshold and when the event loop will get that callback, push to the call stack and execute it - is non-deterministic. The same is with intervals. You may appear in a situation, when, for example, 5 callbacks will be executed one after another without a delay. This is javascript ))