Question

Full disclosure: I’m very new to the totally asynchronous model.

In my application there are a number of instances where information needs to be committed to the db, but the application can continue on without knowing the result. Is it acceptable to render a page before waiting for a db write to complete?

Answer 1

Yes. For example:

app.get('/', function(req, res, next) {
  res.jsonp({
    message: 'Hello World!'
  });
  var i = 0;
  while (true) {
    i++;
  }
});

When a user visits ‘/’, he will see the result immediately. But if there is only one node instance is running, when the other user visits ‘/’, he won’t receive any response as the only instance is under a infinite loop.

If you have a lot of heavy work to do(for example, CPU-bound works), it’s much better to use a message queue such as MSMQ and AMQP instead of having all the works done in the node instance.