title: Executing potentially expensive tasks
body: <p>I have a nodejs tcp server that handles the state of many child servers, when something happens the state server tells a child server to perform an action, it can be potentially expensive, most cases it will be quite expensive (around a minute), on some occasions it will be done in a couple of seconds.</p>
  
  <p>Due to what the child servers are doing (listening on websockets and passing quite a lot of data back and forth very frequently), I can't afford to have the child server stall while operating this expensive task.</p>
  
  <p>Obviously nodejs doesn't have the ability to spawn new threads, without some messy implementation of them. Would it be worth spawning a new process to execute this potentially expensive task, I can determine when it is going to be expensive by the command sent from the parent server.</p>