I just watched the following video: Introduction to Node.js and still don’t understand how you get the speed benefits.
Mainly, at one point Ryan Dahl (Node.js’ creator) says that Node.js is event-loop based instead of thread-based. Threads are expensive and should only be left to the experts of concurrent programming to be utilized.
Later, he then shows the architecture stack of Node.js which has an underlying C implementation which has its own Thread pool internally. So obviously Node.js developers would never kick off their own threads or use the thread pool directly…they use async call-backs. That much I understand.
What I don’t understand is the point that Node.js still is using threads…it’s just hiding the implementation so how is this faster if 50 people request 50 files (not currently in memory) well then aren’t 50 threads required?
The only difference being that since it’s managed internally the Node.js developer doesn’t have to code the threaded details but underneath it’s still using the threads to process the IO (blocking) file requests.
So aren’t you really just taking one problem (threading) and hiding it while that problem still exists: mainly multiple threads, context switching, dead-locks…etc?
There must be some detail I still do not understand here.
