So, I have a service made in node running on Kubernetes and I need to make a very heavy operation every 30 minutes (CRON JOB). It's a bunch of database operations for each tenant on my application (currently, 5 tenants).
The thing is that if I start then all, even asynchronously, on the same process the service goes into too much load and crashes.
Because of this, I tried to use the child_process module. My idea was to create a new process for each tenant,do what it needs to do and then kill the process.
I'm using child_process.fork('heavyLoadFile') to create the child process.
The thing is that when the work is done, the CPs are not being destroyed. They stay there as a "zombie" process, doing absolutely nothing.
I tried to process.kill() on the CP but it also kills the parent process.
How can I kill only the child_process? Oh, and do you guys think of a better way to handle this heavy loads?
Running process.kill() will kill your main NodeJS app and any children it may have.
You need to only kill the child process. like so:
const cp = require("child_process");
// you fork a child (your cron script)
const child = cp.fork("<your program>");
// the rest of your code
// you kill only this child
child.kill();