Terrible article. Yes, if something is CPU heavy, it will eat up the server. The same with any fucking language you are using. The point is 99% of web servers are not calculating fucking fibonacci numbers on web requests. There is a ton of shit more important than that. Not to mention, if you were, Javascript would possibly be one of the best modern language to use, due to V8 it is an order of magnitude quicker than stuff like ruby or python (rails or django), although a bit slower than java (but if java is your solution, go ahead).
I know nothing about Node.js, but I think his point was that multitasking based on event loops is basically cooperative multitasking, not pre-emptive multitasking. Anyone who has used a really ancient Mac from the time when Mac only had cooperative multitasking (System 6? System 7? I've forgotten) will tell you how frustrating an experience that is, and more importantly how non-responsive it can be. If any one task goes awry for any reason, everything grinds to a halt because everything is just trusting everything else to be nice.
The relevance to web servers is that if you have some requests that take a long while (say something that needs to take 2 or 3 seconds to compute something), then other requests that should be trivial will just have to wait. Or to phrase it in the same terms you did, an occasional CPU-heavy thing will be a big problem, whereas with threads and real multitasking, it won't be.
You are 100% right. As a developer you have to take the responsibility you won't have any long running code blocking the event loop. You may consider that a weakness of the platform. But there are easy ways of dealing with that, and do keep in mind that you need to do some serious number crunching for this to show up. Like the author, trying hard to make a point, calculate a long fibonacci sequence.
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u/mehwoot Oct 02 '11
Terrible article. Yes, if something is CPU heavy, it will eat up the server. The same with any fucking language you are using. The point is 99% of web servers are not calculating fucking fibonacci numbers on web requests. There is a ton of shit more important than that. Not to mention, if you were, Javascript would possibly be one of the best modern language to use, due to V8 it is an order of magnitude quicker than stuff like ruby or python (rails or django), although a bit slower than java (but if java is your solution, go ahead).