Prevent tasks from interfering with other tasks

[yocontra]

Scenario:

• You run two tasks - minify-css, minify-js
• minify-js is processing a file and blocks the event loop since the underlying module (let's say uglify) is full of nested loops that take forever
• minify-css is stalled because the main event loop is blocked
• minify-js finishes the file
• minify-css starts processing its file asynchronously like it's supposed to
• minify-js gets another file and blocks the event loop again, thus stalling minify-css until it's done
• minify-js finished before minify-css ever gets through the first file
• minify-css shows up as taking way longer than it should have

tl;dr shitty 3rd party modules that run synchronously (like uglify) will block the main loop preventing other things from running

[narqo]

Doesn't running this synchronous modules in a child process solve this?

[yocontra]

@narqo There are a few ways to emulate threading in node.js

• https://github.com/audreyt/node-webworker-threads
• https://github.com/xk/node-threads-a-gogo
• child process pools

I'm not sure about the threading implementations but the child process route is definitely prohibitive as they can take up to 30ms to spin up

[yocontra]

cc @phated feasibility for wrapping task fns in undertaker with threads?

[phated]

no idea and it won't make sense to do until node 0.12 when we have contexts as contributed by github for atom editor. btw, gulp4 will nextTick everything, not sure if that will help at all.

[heikki]

Closing in favor of #317