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Asked: 2026-06-07T15:16:15+00:00

I am trying to learn Node.js and some of points that I understand: Node.js

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I am trying to learn Node.js and some of points that I understand:

  1. Node.js does’nt create a seperate process for each request, instead it is just one process which processes all requests.

  2. It is asynchronous which means you can attach a callback to a long-lasting process and continue your rest of the work without waiting for it to finish.

What I really don’t understand is author’s point in Understanding node.js – “Everything runs in parallel except your code”. I have understood the analogy and the code that explains it but still I don’t get it what is the distinction between “Everything” and “code”. I have more often heard this about node.js.

Also, people pat node.js for its efficiency since memory overhead for one concurrent connection may be as low as 8KB but what about CPU load. Does node.js make it way less as compared to PHP+Apache?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Node.js uses a single thread any time it is running the JavaScript in your application. Tasks that are asynchronous (network, filesystem, etc.) are all handled on separate threads automatically for you. This means that you get much of the usefulness of a multithreaded application without having to worry about all of the trouble that comes with locking resources and what not.

    Node is not a tool for every job. It is ideal for applications that are IO bound. For example, if your application required a ton of work to process templates and what not, Node probably isn’t for you. If instead you’re just shuffling data around, Node can be very effective.

    The reason Node is often quoted as being faster than servers like Apache is that it doesn’t create a thread and all of the resources with it to handling requests. In Apache, most of the time, that thread handling requests is waiting on network or filesystem data. While it does this, it is wasting resources. With Node, only one thread processes those requests (in your application). Again, this is great for some things, but if you have a lot of processing to do, Node would not be effective as it can really only handle a single request at a time in these situations.

    This video does a pretty good job of explaining: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6k8lTrAE2g&feature=youtube_gdata

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