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How we tamed Node.js event loop lag: a deepdive

We recently experienced some service degradation and downtime due to event loop lag in our Node.js service. Here's how we diagnosed and fixed the issue.

At around 11pm local time (10pm UTC) on Thursday June 20, we were alerted to some issues in our production services powering the Trigger.dev cloud, as some of our dashboard/API instances started crashing. Trigger.dev is implemented as a long-lived Node.js process, which as you can see above, takes some additional work to ensure that a single client can't block the event loop for everyone else. By running background jobs in a separate process, you can avoid event loop lag issues in your main service and scale up and down to handle changing workloads.

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