Clusters of Node.js processes can be used to run multiple instances of Node.js that can distribute workloads among their application threads. When process isolation is not needed, use the worker_threads module instead, which allows running multiple application threads within a single Node.js instance.

The cluster module allows easy creation of child processes that all share server ports.

import cluster from 'node:cluster';
import http from 'node:http';
import { availableParallelism } from 'node:os';
import process from 'node:process';

const numCPUs = availableParallelism();

if (cluster.isPrimary) {
  console.log(`Primary ${process.pid} is running`);

  // Fork workers.
  for (let i = 0; i < numCPUs; i++) {
    cluster.fork();
  }

  cluster.on('exit', (worker, code, signal) => {
    console.log(`worker ${worker.process.pid} died`);
  });
} else {
  // Workers can share any TCP connection
  // In this case it is an HTTP server
  http.createServer((req, res) => {
    res.writeHead(200);
    res.end('hello world\n');
  }).listen(8000);

  console.log(`Worker ${process.pid} started`);
}

Running Node.js will now share port 8000 between the workers:

$ node server.js
Primary 3596 is running
Worker 4324 started
Worker 4520 started
Worker 6056 started
Worker 5644 started

On Windows, it is not yet possible to set up a named pipe server in a worker.