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Worker Threads: Node Parallelism

Concurrency vs Parallelism

Node.js has long excelled at concurrency. With the recent release of Node 13.0, Node now has a stable answer to parallelism as well. 

Concurrency can be thought of as switching between async processes, which all take turns executing, and, while idle, return control back to the event loop. On the other hand, parallelism is the ability for a process to separate and run simultaneously on multiple threads. There are other solutions in JavaScript that have tried to address this problem. For an in-depth comparison, I found this article useful.

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Using Node 11.7 Worker Threads With RxJS Observable

NodeJS worker_thread module and RxJS observables

With the release of Node 11.7, the worker_threads module becomes a standard feature and is no longer hidden behind the --experimental-worker switch. The worker_threads module allows developers to run JavaScript asynchronously in light-weight, isolated threads contained within the main Node process. This article will be focusing on how use worker threads to execute a task asynchronously and stream data from that task back to the rest of your Node application using RxJS Observables.

Before we get started, if you want to learn more about worker threads and why you might want to use them, I would recommend reading Node.js multithreading: What are Worker Threads and why do they matter? by Alberto Gimeno. Alberto has done a fantastic job explaining the purpose of the worker_thread module, provided some solid examples of where it makes sense to use it, as well as demonstrated some alternate ways to build a multi-threaded Node app.