A really fast way to run a callback in the future
npm install fast-future
Since node.js v0.10.x the semantics of process.nextTick changed (see docs). To get the old behaviour one can use setImmediate instead.
The good part about process.nextTick is that it's really really fast. The bad part is that event loop can be starved and if run for to long time it'll eventually die with a RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded.
What's good about setImmediate is that it won't starve the event loop. However, it's a bit slower than process.nextTick.
fast-future uses the best from the both worlds - the callback will most of the times be called in a process.nextTick, but once in a while it'll get run in a setImmediate - so you'll get crazy performance, and the event loop won't get starved or crash or something sad like that.
For me running the benchmarks show the following result
# setImmediate
setImmediate: 2317ms
# fastFuture
fastFuture: 96ms
For node v0.8.x it'll fallback to using process.nextTick
var fastFuture = require('./fast-future')()
fastFuture(function () {
console.log('this is being run in the future')
})Thanks @mafintosh for suggesting this!
Copyright (c) 2014 David Björklund
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