Intro

I'm trying out Node.js right now ( coming from PHP background).

I'm already catching the vibe of the workflow with it (events, promises, inheritance..haven't figured out streams yet).

I've chosen a graphic portfolio web app as my first nodejs project. I know node.js might not fit best for this use case but I it's a good playground and I need to do this anyway.

The concept:

1. The visitors will only browse through pretty pictures in albums, no logging in or subscirptions, nothing.

2. The administrators will add,modify, reorder.. CRUD the photo albums. So I need there Auth, ACL, Validation, imagemagick... a lot more than just on the frontend.

Currently I'm running one instance of Node.js, so both admin and visitor code is in one shared codebase and shared node memory runtime, which to me looks unnecessary performance-wise.

Question

For both performance and usability:

Should I continue running one instance of node for both admin and visitor areas of the web app or should I run them as 2 separate instances? (or subtasks? - honestly i haven't worked with subtasks/child processes)

Ideas floating around

• Use nginx as proxy if splitting into 2 applications
• Look into http://stackoverflow.com/a/5683938/339872. There's some interesting mentions of tools to help manage processes.