Best way to manage unique child processes in node.js

Question

Best way to manage unique child processes in node.js

I'm about to start coding a chat bot. However, I plan on running more than one, using a wrapper to communicate and restart them. I have done this in the past with child_process.fork(), but it was incredibly inefficient. I've looked into spawn and cluster as well, but they all seem to focus on running the same thing, not unique bots. As for plugins, I've looked into fleet, forkfriend, and workerfarm, but none seem to fit my needs.

Is there any plugin or way I'm not seeing to help me do this? Or am I just going to have o wing it again?

node.js
child-process

Answer 1

You can have as many chat bots as you wish in a single process. The rule of thumb in Node.js is using one process per processor core since Node has slightly different multithreading model you might got used to.

Assuming you still need some multithreading on top of this, here is a couple of node modules you might find fitting your needs: node-webworker-threads, dnode.

UPDATE:

Now I see what you need. There is a nice example in Node.js docs, which I saw recently. I just copy & paste it here:

var normal = require('child_process').fork('child.js', ['normal']);
var special = require('child_process').fork('child.js', ['special']);

// Open up the server and send sockets to child
var server = require('net').createServer();
server.on('connection', function (socket) {

  // if this is a VIP
  if (socket.remoteAddress === '74.125.127.100') {
    special.send('socket', socket);
    return;
  }
  // just the usual dudes
  normal.send('socket', socket);
});
server.listen(1337);

child.js looks like this:

process.on('message', function(m, socket) {
  if (m === 'socket') {
    socket.end('You were handled as a ' + process.argv[2] + ' person');
  }
});

I believe it's pretty much what you need. Launch several processes with different configs (if number of configs is relatively low) and pass socket to a particular one from master process.