Node.js / express: respond immediately to client request and continue tasks in nextTick

Question

I would like to separate server high consuming CPU task from user experience:

./main.js:

var express = require(\'express\');
var Test = require(\'./resou         


        

Answer 1

A good solution is to use child_process.fork(): it allows you to execute another JavaScript file of your app in a different Node instance, and thus in a different event loop. Of course, you can still communicate between the two processes by sending messages: so, from your UI process, you can send a message to the forked process to ask it to execute something.

For example, in ui.js:

var ChildProcess = require('child_process');
var heavyTaskWorker = ChildProcess.fork('./heavyTaskWorker.js');
...
var message = {
    operation: "longOperation1",
    parameters: {
        param1: "value1",
        ...
    }
};
heavyTaskWorker.send(message);

And in heavyTaskWorker.js:

process.on('message', function (message) {
    switch (message.operation) {
    case 'longOperation1':
        longOperation1.apply(null, message.parameters);
        break;
    ...
    }
});

Tested here, and it works fine!

Hope that helps!