hive

Threaded script evaluation in Node.js.

Hive is an experiment in leveraging Node.js' default thread pool for improving the performance of CPU-bound computations. Hive's main feature is an asynchronous variant of the builtin eval function, where the expression passed will be executed in a separate context on one of the worker threads behind Node.js' event loop.

See the accompanying blog post here for a more detailed introduction.

Note: It turns out that this project is extremely similar to the more popular Threads-A-Gogo. I haven't spent much time looking at this project, but it seems that the primary difference is that hive does not expose an interface for you to create and manage threads directly, whereas TAGG does. Rather, hive only allows evaluation on the existing threads in the default libuv thread pool.

Installation

Hive is not available in the public npm registry as it is not intended for production use. Please either install from source, or point npm to this repository.

$ npm install nick-thompson/hive

Example Usage

var Hive = require('hive');

function fib(n) {
  if (n < 2) {
    return 1;
  }
  return fib(n - 2) + fib(n - 1);
}

Hive.init(fib.toString());

Hive.eval('fib(35);', function(err, res) {
  console.log(res); // 14930352
});

API

Hive.init(script: string) : undefined

Initialize Hive by creating N new v8 Isolates and v8 Contexts, where each Context will be prepared by evaluating the given script argument. Exceptions raised by evaluating script will not be caught. Hive.init must be called only once before calls to Hive.eval.

By default, Node.js' uses a libuv thread pool containing 4 threads, thus, upon initialization, Hive will create 4 new v8 Isolates and v8 Contexts. This number is configurable by setting the UV_THREADPOOL_SIZE environment variable: UV_THREADPOOL_SIZE=8 node myscript.js.

Hive.eval(script: string, callback: function) : undefined

Queue the given script for evaluation on one of the worker threads in the pool. The result will be marshalled via JSON.stringify for the safe exchange from the worker Isolate to the main thread Isolate, thus your result must stringify successfully.

When the work is completed, callback will be called with three arguments: (err, result, latency). The first two are as you might expect, and latency will be the time, in milliseconds, that your request sat in the queue.

Motivation

See the blog post linked in the introduction for a more thorough explanation of the motivation behind this project.

JavaScript is an extremely popular language for implementing build tools for front end web projects. While this certainly makes sense, it imposes an unfortunate limitation on the performance of the CPU-bound work required in building such projects due to the single-threaded nature of JavaScript. Hive attempts to remedy this problem in Node.js' by leveraging the existing libuv thread pool to enable concurrent JavaScript execution, while avoiding the overhead of process-based parallelism common to Node.js developers via the builtin cluster module.

Hive is obviously not the first project to attempt to introduce the benefits of multi-threading to JavaScript. In fact, a future version of Node.js will be expected to introduce Workers, similar to Web Workers, for concurrent JavaScript execution, which would make Hive largely obsolete. Until then, this project only serves to help demonstrate the value of such features in JavaScript.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

nick-thompson / hive