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0 pointsdmitriid6y ago0 comments

> The only thing I can think of where a programmer could "easily" block the event loop would be

Parsing JSON. Or executing a regex. Or anything, really, that blocks the thread: https://nodejs.org/en/docs/guides/dont-block-the-event-loop/

There's no magic

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davedx6y ago· 1 in thread

Well it's a question of magnitude. In theory everything blocks the loop even if it's only 1 CPU cycle before it yields.

In practice I've rarely seen production nodejs applications cause significant CPU blocking issues. Huge JSON parses sometimes, yes, but then it has to be one hell of a payload to cause any significant issue.

Regexes? Have you really seen regexes block CPU for significant time relative to the rest of the application? I'm sure it's possible with a crazy enough runaway pattern, but I've never seen it happen.

I really don't understand what people are getting at here. Nodejs is an async programming model, it's non-blocking by default. Are the people saying it's trivial to break nodejs developers?

dmitriidOP6y ago

My original response was to this [1]

> I think it's much easier to block a thread with C#'s async programming model than node's...

Which spawned a discussion in which people seemingly think that you can't block a thread in node, or that since node is async it means it's not single-threaded etc.

Since it is single-threaded, it's quite possible that the original post wouldn't need 4000 node instances otherwise (emphasis mine):

> We were running 4,000 Node containers (or "workers") for our bank integration service. The service was originally designed such that each worker would process only a single request at a time. This design lessened the impact of integrations that accidentally blocked the event loop

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21782591

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