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> Secondly, simply spawning threads is laughably non scalable How else are you going to do it with a non-threaded language? I've ran well into the 10s of reque

> Secondly, simply spawning threads is laughably non scalable How else are you going to do it with a non-threaded language? I've ran well into the 10s of requests per second running "standard" PHP code on practically vanilla Apache configs. This was far from atypical and is no way any kind of challenge on a beefy machine. My job was not to clean up disasters though. Maybe if your job was to clean up disasters, your typical was much different than mine?

z3t4 9y ago
The problem with multi threading like in PHP is that you need locks. It will not be a problem if you have low traffic but once you get hundreds of requests per seconds there's a high chance for errors like "double posts" where both threads say "post don't exist" and then both threads make the post, and you end up with double posts. Or racing conditions, double spending, etc. With NodeJS you get rid of all those problems because it's single threaded.
- debaserab2 9y ago
  The server spawns the threads and isolates the entirety of a single request to a single thread. It's not true language multithreading.
  - z3t4 9y ago
    JavaScript is single threaded, but all IO operations like network and disk uses threads in Node.JS, So there are still racing conditions, like when accessing the file system. But all other operations are single threaded, like storing data in memory. In for example PHP, where the server spawns the threads everything becomes multi threaded. In node.js instead of using locks etc, you use callbacks, so when something is finished, a function is called ... It's just like event listeners in the browser. Many people complain about Node.JS being single threaded, but it's actually a big relief, they probably haven't been dealing with issues like locks and racing conditions. To get cpu bound parallelism in Node.JS you have to spawn child processes. There's a built in module in NodeJS called "cluster" that abstracts this a bit. When talking to a child process you could just as well be talking to another machine over the network, the code will look the same, and scaling horizontally across many machines will be easier, compared to languages that solve concurrency by using threads instead of non blocking IO. There's a learning curve though. It took me about six months to learn how to do async programming, manage messages between different processes and machines, and callbacks, I do remember the "callback hell", but now it has become a second nature, it's like brushing my teeth, but more fun. I don't think half a year is that bad, you would need just as long time to get comfortable in any other language. And I consider JavaScript very newbie friendly, you don't need a CS degree to write JavaScript.
    - debaserab2 9y ago
      > In for example PHP, where the server spawns the threads everything becomes multi threaded. No it doesn't. The only way to do truly multithreaded code in PHP is using pthreads.

z3t4 9y ago

The problem with multi threading like in PHP is that you need locks. It will not be a problem if you have low traffic but once you get hundreds of requests per seconds there's a high chance for errors like "double posts" where both threads say "post don't exist" and then both threads make the post, and you end up with double posts. Or racing conditions, double spending, etc. With NodeJS you get rid of all those problems because it's single threaded.

debaserab2 9y ago
The server spawns the threads and isolates the entirety of a single request to a single thread. It's not true language multithreading.
- z3t4 9y ago
  JavaScript is single threaded, but all IO operations like network and disk uses threads in Node.JS, So there are still racing conditions, like when accessing the file system. But all other operations are single threaded, like storing data in memory. In for example PHP, where the server spawns the threads everything becomes multi threaded. In node.js instead of using locks etc, you use callbacks, so when something is finished, a function is called ... It's just like event listeners in the browser. Many people complain about Node.JS being single threaded, but it's actually a big relief, they probably haven't been dealing with issues like locks and racing conditions. To get cpu bound parallelism in Node.JS you have to spawn child processes. There's a built in module in NodeJS called "cluster" that abstracts this a bit. When talking to a child process you could just as well be talking to another machine over the network, the code will look the same, and scaling horizontally across many machines will be easier, compared to languages that solve concurrency by using threads instead of non blocking IO. There's a learning curve though. It took me about six months to learn how to do async programming, manage messages between different processes and machines, and callbacks, I do remember the "callback hell", but now it has become a second nature, it's like brushing my teeth, but more fun. I don't think half a year is that bad, you would need just as long time to get comfortable in any other language. And I consider JavaScript very newbie friendly, you don't need a CS degree to write JavaScript.
  - debaserab2 9y ago
    > In for example PHP, where the server spawns the threads everything becomes multi threaded. No it doesn't. The only way to do truly multithreaded code in PHP is using pthreads.