microjob VS threadedClass

node.js is multithreaded under the hood and always has been. It's true that we used to not have multi thread capability as developers, but we actually have for several years now, but most developers have probably never used it. Even prior to Worker Threads/Shared Buffers, we had 3rd party modules such as node-fiber and various shared memory data structure libraries which could be used to build multi threaded javascript programs. https://github.com/wilk/microjob <- dead simple batteries included multi threading in node.js

Real life example: We wanted our website to be static files to save on system time as a kind of caching strategy. So far there are about 100 pages that need to be rendered sometimes when there is an update to the site. Running all of this through our templating engine at once caused the node server to be unresponsive for about 30 to 40 seconds. No joy. There are a few ways to solve this but the one we decided on was to use web worker threads for this execution because this was not going to happen very often. About 5% to 10% of the time. It basically just puts this function (rendering all of the pages) into another thread and returns the result. Now this takes about 15 to 20 seconds and does not hold up the main thread. We used a library called Microjob that makes using a web worker really easy https://github.com/wilk/microjob

A while ago I made a comparison of the overhead of making a call into a worker-thread vs just making the all internally, it might provide some insight: https://github.com/nytamin/threadedClass#notes-on-performance