Node.js Interview Questions
Master the event loop, streams, microservices, and backend architecture scaling.
Editorial Integrity
Questions verified against Node.js v20 LTS documentation.
How do you prevent the Node.js event loop from blocking?
You prevent blocking by avoiding synchronous operations (like `fs.readFileSync`) and offloading heavy CPU tasks to Worker Threads or external services.
Deep Dive Explanation
Node.js runs on a single thread. If you execute a massive `while` loop or complex cryptography on that thread, it cannot process any other incoming HTTP requests. To prevent this, you should use asynchronous I/O methods (which offload work to the libuv thread pool) and use Worker Threads (`worker_threads` module) for heavy CPU-bound tasks like image processing or large JSON parsing.
Using `JSON.parse()` on a 50MB string synchronously, which blocks the event loop for hundreds of milliseconds.