A simple Hello world program creates multiple node instances

Question

I am very new to Javascript and NodeJS. I'm running a simple helloworld program as follows

plan 1

const durationInSeconds = 10;

console.log('Hello World');

setTimeout(() => {
  console.log(`Program has been running for ${durationInSeconds} seconds.`);
}, durationInSeconds * 1000);

When I run this program, I am using the htop command in Linux to monitor the process. I noticed that the application was creating 7 node instances of the same application. Why does this happen? Why doesn't it create just one node instance for a single simple application? I have this problem because if I run a similar program in python, I only see one instance of the python application running.

Answer 1

Nodejs requires threads to perform other tasks that the V8 engine handles automatically. Some of these things are

• Interpreters
• Event Loop
• Garbage Collector
• Blocking I/O executor and others...

Nodejs makes programming easy by hiding these complexities from programmers. If you need more control over this lower level "stuff" then you use C, C++ or other low level languages ​​and you have to decide what should go in which thread.