node-threadpool

WARNING: This project is mostly experimental and the API is subject to change.

This package implements thread pools using node 10.5's new worker thread API (see: https://nodejs.org/api/worker_threads.html).

Features

• Lightweight: one dependency (surrial) for serialization
• Simple API: submit a function, await a result (no need to mess with loading from files, strings, etc.)
• Supports transpiled code (ex: you may use Typescript to define your workers)
• Can send most types of data including maps, sets, etc.
• Supports shared data between threads, see the example

Why

Worker threads are usually expensive to create, a thread pool maintains the threads and allows you to submit work on the fly, without having to pay the cost of recreating threads.

With node's new worker_thread API, threads in the pool can pass messages to each other and read and write to shared memory.

Usage

Full API documentation can be found here: https://psastras.github.io/node-threadpool/api/modules/executors.html.

If you're familiar with Java's thread pool API, this should be very familiar:

import { Executors } from "node-threadpool";
 
const pool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(1);
const result = pool.submit(async () => "hello world");
 
console.log(await result); // prints "hello world"

Requires node 10.5+. You must run node with the --experimental-worker flag enabled.

NODE_OPTIONS=--experimental-worker ./server.js

or

node --experimental-worker ./server.js

Detailed Usage Instructions

To install:

yarn add node-threadpool

or

npm install node-threadpool

Import node-threadpool:

import { Executors } from "node-threadpool";

Executors contains methods to create different thread pools.

Create a thread pool by calling one of these methods:

// creates a thread pool with 4 threads
const pool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(4);

Then submit work to the pool with the submit method. This method takes in a function with no arguments that returns a Promise. The submit method itself returns a Promise which is resolved when the function has been executed.

// these execute in parallel (as long as the pool size >= 2)
const result1 = pool.submit(async () => "done 1");
const result2 = pool.submit(async () => "done 2");
 
console.log(await result1); // joins and prints "done1"
console.log(await result2); // joins and prints "done2"

See the documentation for full API details.

Note: if you're not using async / await, Promise based functions work just as well.

Warning

You may only access data within the runnable function's context. For example, this is an error:

const hello = "hello";
await pool.submit(async () => hello);

Instead, use the optional data object when submitting the function:

const hello = "hello";
await pool.submit(async (data) => data, hello);

Similarly you must require third party modules from inside the run method:

await pool.submit(async () => {
  const fs = require('fs');
  fs.readFileSync('README');
});

Examples

Basic Usage

const pool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(4);
const result = pool.submit(async () => "hello world");
console.log(await result); // prints "hello world"

Pass Data

const pool = Executors.newSingleThreadedExecutor();
const map = new Map();
map.set("key", "value");
const data = {
  map 
};
const result = pool.submit(async d => d.map.get("key"), data);
console.log(await result); // prints "value"

Shared Data

Simple shared array buffer

const buffer = new SharedArrayBuffer(1 * Int32Array.BYTES_PER_ELEMENT);
const array = new Int32Array(sharedBuffer);
 
// theres no lock, so in order to write safely we'll use one thread for this toy example
// see the next example for atomic usage
const pool = Executors.newSingleThreadedExecutor();
 
// set the data in the shared buffer to 42
await pool.submit(async d => (new Int32Array(d)[0] = 42), buffer);
 
// read the data from the shared buffer
const result = pool.submit(async d => new Int32Array(d)[0], buffer);
 
console.log(await result); // prints 42

Atomics

const buffer = new SharedArrayBuffer(1 * Int32Array.BYTES_PER_ELEMENT);
const array = new Int32Array(buffer);
const pool = Executors.newSingleThreadedExecutor();
 
const result = pool.submit(async d => {
  const view = new Int32Array(d);
  Atomics.wait(view, 0, 0); // wait here until the value is no longer 0
  return Atomics.load(view, 0);
}, buffer);
 
Atomics.store(array, 0, 1); // change the value from 0, unblocking the worker thread
 
console.log(await result); // prints 1

TODOs

• Figure out better function / data serialization.
• Support cached thread executor
• Clean up code
• Settle on an API (when node's api is stable)
• Support nested shared buffer serialization

License

MIT Licensed, see the LICENSE file.