Node.js the Right Way

Clustering Node.js Processes

In multithreaded systems, doing more work in parallel means spinning up more threads. But Node.js uses a single-threaded event loop, so to take advantage of multiple cores or multiple processors on the same computer, you have to spin up more Node processes.

This is called clustering and it’s what Node’s built-in cluster module does. Clustering is a useful technique for scaling up your Node application when there’s unused CPU capacity available. Scaling a Node application is a big topic with lots of choices based on your particular scenario, but no matter how you end up doing it, you’ll probably start with clustering.

To explore how the cluster module works, we’ll build up a program that manages a pool of worker processes ...