Multithreading in Javascript: A guide to Web Workers

Stop letting heavy computations freeze your UI. Learn how Web Workers unlock true parallelism in JavaScript, keeping your application responsive and running at 60 FPS.

#1about 2 minutes

Why front-end performance matters for business success

Poor application performance leads to user churn and reduced revenue, highlighting the need to understand JavaScript's single-threaded nature.

#2about 1 minute

How the JavaScript engine executes functions

The call stack is a last-in, first-out (LIFO) data structure that the JavaScript engine uses to track function execution.

#3about 5 minutes

Demystifying asynchronous execution with the event loop

Asynchronous operations like promises and timers are managed by the event loop, which prioritizes the microtask queue over the macrotask queue.

#4about 2 minutes

Moving from concurrency to true parallelism

Web Workers enable true parallelism by running scripts on a background thread, communicating with the main thread via the postMessage API.

#5about 6 minutes

Preventing UI freezes with a Web Worker demo

A live demo shows how running a CPU-intensive chess move calculation in a Web Worker keeps the main thread responsive and the UI smooth.

#6about 3 minutes

Understanding Web Worker limitations and solutions

Web Workers cannot access the DOM and incur overhead from data serialization, but the OffscreenCanvas API allows direct canvas manipulation from a worker.

#7about 2 minutes