Node.js, MongoDB, and AngularJS Web Development

Implementing Child Forks

Node.js provides a specialized form of process spawning called a fork, which is designed to execute Node.js module code inside another V8 instance running on a separate processor. You can use a fork to run multiple services in parallel. However, it takes time to spin up a new instance of V8, and each instance takes about 10MB of memory. Therefore, you should design forked processes to be longer lived, and you shouldn’t require a large number of them. Remember that you really don’t get a performance benefit from creating more processes than you have CPUs in the system.

Unlike spawn, you cannot configure stdio for the child process. Instead, you use the send() mechanism in the ChildProcess object to communicate between ...