The reactor pattern
In this section, we will analyze the reactor pattern, which is the heart of the asynchronous nature of Node.js. We will go through the main concepts behind the pattern, such as the single-threaded architecture and the non-blocking I/O, and we will see how this creates the foundation for the entire Node.js platform.
I/O is slow
I/O is definitely the slowest among the fundamental operations of a computer. Accessing the RAM is in the order of nanoseconds (10E-9 seconds), while accessing data on the disk or the network is in the order of milliseconds (10E-3 seconds). For the bandwidth, it is the same story; RAM has a transfer rate consistently in the order of GB/s, while disk and network varies from MB/s to, optimistically, GB/s. ...
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