Is it okay to run multiple nodejs processes on a single core?

Question

Ok, so the thing is, we have multiple NodeJS web servers which need to be online all the time. But they'll not be recieving many requests, approx. 100-200 requests a day. The tasks aren't CPU intensive either. We are provisioning EC2 instances for it. So, the question is, can we run multiple nodejs processes on a single core? If not, is it possible to run more low intensity NodeJS processes than number of cores present? What are the pros and cons? Any benchmarks available?

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible. The OS (or VM on top of the OS) will simply share the single CPU among the processes allocated to it. If, as you say, you don't have a lot of requests and those requests aren't very CPU hungry, then everything should work just fine and you probably won't even notice that you're sharing a single CPU among a couple server processes. The OS/VM will time slice among the processes using that CPU, but most of the time you won't even have more than one process asking to use the CPU anyway.

Pros/Cons - Really only that performance might momentarily slow down if both servers get CPU-busy at the same time.

Benchmarks - This is highly dependent upon how much CPU your servers are using and when they try to use it. With the small number of requests you're talking about and the fact that they aren't CPU intensive, it's unlikely a user of either server would even notice. Your CPU is going to be idle most of the time.

If you happen to run a request for each server at the exact same moment and that request would normally take 500ms to complete and most of that was not even CPU time, then perhaps each of these two requests might then take 750ms instead (slightly overlapping CPU time that must be shared). But, most of the time, you're not even going to encounter a request from each of your two servers running at the same time because there are so few requests anyway.