Offload work to a background process in Node JS

Javascript is a single threaded language, so the moment you start running some intensive task, it will block the event loop and prevent the rest of your application from working.

while (10 > 5) {
  console.log(
    "This will never end and will cause the browser tab to freeze or the Node.js process to stall indefinitely.",
  )
}

While most applications won't have any forever-tasks that stall it completely, functions that take a long time to run can degrade the user experience elsewhere in the app.

This can cause dropped network requests, slow page loads, and other issues.

If it's javascript's bottleneck that a single javascript process can only run one thread at a time, then the solution must be to use multiple javascript processes to run different parts of our application.

By offloading the work to a separate process, we can keep our main application running and responsive while the background tasks run.

The simplest setup is to use a singleton module to spawn a new Node.js process that runs another javascript file.

import { spawn } from "child_process"
import { join } from "path"
 
let subprocess: ReturnType<typeof spawn> | null = null
 
declare global {
  var subprocess: ReturnType<typeof spawn> | null
}
 
if (!global.subprocess) {
  global.subprocess = spawn(
    "node",
    join(__dirname, "subprocess.js"),
    {
      stdio: "inherit",
      shell: true,
      detached: true,
    },
  )
}
 
subprocess = global.subprocess
 
export default subprocess

This will successfully offload the work to a separate process, but to be a practical solution for most developers, there are many more things to consider.

• How do we communicate between the two processes?
• How do we handle errors?
• How do we run a typescript file?
• How do we handle the subprocess crashing?

Rather than solving these one by one, we can use a battle-tested library like BullMQ that supports background processes natively to handle all of these concerns.