Summary

To make the most of Node.js performance on servers with multiple processors, you need to be able to farm off work to the other processes. The process module allows you to interact with the system process, the child_process module allows you to actually execute code on a separate process, and the cluster module allows you to create a cluster of HTTP or TCP servers.

child_process provides the exec(), execFile(), spawn(), and fork() functions, which start work on separate processes. The ChildProcess and Worker objects provide IPC channels that allow you to communicate between the parent and child processes.