Effective Parallel Task Management in JavaScript

Hi there! 🖖

I suddenly decided to share my experience with p-limit. This library allows you to control the number of concurrently running asynchronous operations, which is especially useful when working with resource-intensive or rate-limited APIs.

❓ Why is this important?
When working with a large number of asynchronous tasks, such as API requests or I/O operations, executing all tasks simultaneously can lead to system overload or exceeding API limits. To avoid this situation and improve application performance, it is necessary to limit the number of parallel tasks.

Overall, the project documentation is very clear. I will just show you the tip of the iceberg.

Installation is done as usual, through any package manager. I prefer pnpm, but here is an example for npm:

npm install p-limit

For CommonJS projects:

npm install p-limit@3.1.0

Suppose we have an array of asynchronous tasks and want to limit the execution to 2 parallel tasks:

const pLimit = require('p-limit');

const limit = pLimit(2); // Limit to 2 concurrent tasks

const tasks = [
  async () => { /* Task 1 */ },
  async () => { /* Task 2 */ },
  async () => { /* Task 3 */ },
  async () => { /* Task 4 */ }
];

const limitedTasks = tasks.map(task => limit(task));

Promise.all(limitedTasks).then(results => {
  console.log(results);
});

Yes, it's that simple to solve this task 🙂

I want to highlight an important point. The package does not support CJS starting from version 4.0.0. So either install the older version - 3.1.0, or migrate your project to ESM.

📦 NPM
🔗 GitHub

#npm #useful #tools