Using Web Workers alongside RxJS
We all know that JavaScript is a single-threaded language, at least in the browser runtime environment. This means that browsers can process one operation at a time. So, if we have a long-running task, it can block the main thread, meaning that the browser would freeze and block the whole user experience. Usually, on the client side, we don’t have to deal with computationally intensive or long-running tasks, but when we do, we can offload heavy workloads to the separate thread that runs in the background, similar to Web Workers, which can help us prevent UI freezes and ensure smooth interactions, even when we’re performing resource-intensive operations.
How to do it…
In this recipe, we’ll simulate computationally intensive operations by creating a web worker and running one million iterations of some simple transformations.
Step 1 – Setting up a web worker in Angular
If we want our web worker to be...
