Is it expensive/efficient to send data between processes in Node?

Question

Node allows you to spawn child processes and send data between them. You could use it do execute some blocking code for example.

Documentation says \"These child No

Answer 1

This really depends on your server resources and the number of nodes you need to spin up.

As a rule of thumb:

• Try reusing running children as much as possible - this will save you 30ms start up time
• Do not start unlimited number of children (1 per request for instance) - you will not run out of RAM

The messaging itself it relatively fast i believe. Would be great to see some metrics though.

Also, note that if you have single CPU or running a cluster (using all available cores) it doesn't make much sense. You still have limited CPU capacity and switching context is more expensive than running single process.