Question

What are the benefits of a single-threaded web backend to a multi-threaded one?

Answer 1

Put another way: though Node is single-threaded, most of the programming languages used for backend development provides multiple threads to handle application operations. In what way is having only a single thread is beneficial to backend development?

• It’s easier for developers to implement applications. Our applications have no risk of running into unexpected race conditions suddenly while in production.
• Single-threaded applications are easily scalable.
• They can serve a large number of user requests received at a moment without much delay. In comparison, a multi-threaded backend has to wait for a thread from the thread pool to be free to serve the user request when traffic is high. With Node’s non-blocking nature, there’s no risk of a user request hanging on to the single thread for too long (this is true only when the operations are not CPU-intensive).