The Node.js single-thread architecture
When Node.js came out in 2009, it was a revolution in the web development world, as Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, decided to use a very unusual approach at that time: a single-thread architecture.
In his presentation about Node.js at the JSConf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeYvFl7li9E), Ryan Dahl said he wanted to achieve two key things when building Node.js: server-side JavaScript and non-blocking I/O.
I/O needs to be done differently
The common approach for I/O operations in web applications is to create a new thread for each request. This is a very expensive operation because the memory consumption is very high and the performance is very low.
The idea behind this approach is to split the system resources and assign them to each thread. This is a very inefficient approach because, most of the time, the CPUs are idle, just waiting for the resources.
The other problem is that we are limited in the amount of memory that...
