Synchronous vs. asynchronous database access

Question

I want to develop a complex game with possibly thousands of functions and database calls.

I am wondering if it's really necessary to do my database queries in async. Its a pain to code, and all of my functions will need to use callbacks instead of the clean return method. Is this a normal approach?

Are coding these calls in async really that much faster, considering a MySQL database processes a single query at a time?

Answer 1

Unless something changed drastically in Node.JS recently, you're pretty much forced to use async database access to scale well since all your user requests will execute on one single thread and synchronously waiting for the database will really drop your performance. If one user does a slow operation, all other users will have to wait until it's done.

Node.JS is really built for an async event driven flow, you'll get much better performance working with it than working around it.

Answer 2

Asynchronous request are not faster than synchronous ones, no matter how you do them they still do the same exact thing. The only this that changes is rather you block on the request or not.

When you go with a synchronous the method that made the request will stop its execution waiting for the return of the request, only when that got through will it continue with its execution. Though when using asynchronous request, there's no need to wait for the request to complete, you can jut keep on and when it's done the callback will be called upon.

Another thing is that usually the database is the bottleneck when the application is making a lot of calls to the dbms, because of that you might want to consider using come kind of caching to reduce to load from the dbms.