Working with worker threads

JavaScript is a single-threaded programming language, which means that only one task is executed at a time within a process. Node.js runs on a single thread, but the Node.js event loop enables non-blocking I/O calls. The event loop executes one task at a time. As a result, CPU-intensive tasks can block the event loop, impacting the overall performance of your application.

Should you wish to execute CPU-intensive tasks in Node.js, then you should consider using worker threads. Worker threads are declared stable in Node.js version 12 and upward and are exposed via the Node.js core worker_threads module. The worker threads API enables the use of threads to execute JavaScript in parallel and is best suited to handle CPU-intensive JavaScript operations.

This recipe will introduce worker_threads and showcase how we can use it to handle CPU-intensive tasks.

Getting ready

First, ensure you're using Node.js 14 (preferably the latest available version...