How run async / await in parallel in Javascript

Question

Finally async/await will be supported in all major browser soon except IE. So now we can start writing more readable code with async/<

Answer 1

You can write something like this:

const responses = await Promise.all([
 fetchUserAsync(),
 fetchPostsAsync(),
]);

const userResponse = responses[0];
const postsResponse = responses[1];

This is easy right? But there is a catch. Promise.all has fail-fast behaviour which means, it will reject as soon as one of the promises rejected. Probably you want a more robust solution where we are in charge of handling the rejections any of the fetches. Luckily there is a solution, it can be achieved simply with async/await without the need of using Promise.all. A working example:

console.clear();

function wait(ms, data) {
  return new Promise( resolve => setTimeout(resolve.bind(this, data), ms) );
}

/** 
 * This will run in series, because 
 * we call a function and immediately wait for it's result, 
 * so this will finish in 1s.
 */
async function series() {
  return {
    result1: await wait(500, 'seriesTask1'),
    result2: await wait(500, 'seriesTask2'),
  }
}

/** 
 * While here we call the functions first,
 * then wait for the result later, so 
 * this will finish in 500ms.
 */
async function parallel() {
  const task1 = wait(500, 'parallelTask1');
  const task2 = wait(500, 'parallelTask2');

  return {
    result1: await task1,
    result2: await task2,
  }
}

async function taskRunner(fn, label) {
  const startTime = performance.now();
  console.log(`Task ${label} starting...`);
  let result = await fn();
  console.log(`Task ${label} finished in ${ Number.parseInt(performance.now() - startTime) } miliseconds with,`, result);
}

void taskRunner(series, 'series');
void taskRunner(parallel, 'parallel');


/* 
 * The result will be:
 * Task series starting...
 * Task parallel starting...
 * Task parallel finished in 500 milliseconds with, { "result1": "parallelTask1", "result2": "parallelTask2" }
 * Task series finished in 1001 milliseconds with, { "result1": "seriesTask1", "result2": "seriesTask2" }
 */

Note: You will need a browser which has async/await enabled to run this snippet (or nodejs v7 and above)

This way you can use simply try/ catch to handle your errors, and return partial results inside the parallel function.