Serial and Parallel JS Promises

A week ago, I was looking at a bug. Some operations were being performed that resulted in the change of state of the IndexedDB storage.

(I can't share all the details so please, bear with me)

For one of the operations, a piece of data was being calculated again and this should not have been happening as this data was already calculated as a part of another operation and any following operations should have referred to this pre-calculated data.

The way these operations were being performed was not exactly apparent and clear as a list of these operations was basically being passed on to another method which was using some deep-nested logic to execute them.

Turns out that Promise.all was being used to resolve the results from all the operations in the list.

Difference between Serial and Parallel

In my mind, I had formed a general model of the process: Operation 1 is performed and then Operation 2 is performed and so on.
This model where operations happen in a sequence is called Serial and if I am being honest, this is how I usually think that things are done.

Turns out that there is another model: Operation 1 is being performed and simultaneously, Operation 2 is being performed. There is no exact order/relation between the end of Operation 1 and start of Operation 2.
This model is called Parallel and this was one of the reasons behind the bug I was looking into.

What does Promise.all do?

const bakeCake = (): Promise<CakeDetails> => {// something};
const eatCake = (): Promise<EatenCakeDetails> => {// something};


Promise.all([bakeCake(), eatCake()]).then((result) => {
    console.warn('Result', result);
});

In life, you first bake the cake and then eat it.

But, using the above code example you can bake and eat the cake simultaneously (assuming that the eatCake fallbacks to baking a cake in case one doesn't already exists).

What is it good for?

It is basically a way to perform concurrent operations in JS.

It should only be used to perform independent asynchronous operations.

Based on the above statement, the cake example is an incorrect usage of Promise.all and a similar mistake was the reason behind the bug I was looking at.

Is it a way to perform operations parallelly?

No. It is not.
It may look like that the operations are being performed parallelly but, they are not. Instead, the right term for this behavior is Concurrent.

The thing responsible for executing a piece of JS is single-threaded and therefore, only a single operation can occupy it at a time.

And in the case of Promise.all, this thing is actually bouncing between multiple operations by starting an operation, suspending it and then, starting of another one, suspending it, resuming the previous one and so on.
Therefore, we can't call it parallel because, at a give time only single operation is being worked on.

(NB: I am using simplified names to prevent confusion caused by terminology)

Does it have a performance impact?

Is Promise.all faster then waiting for every promise to be resolved before proceeding on to the next one?
I am not so sure. I am yet to find a definitive answer and I shall share my thoughts on the same later.

References

This post is based on what I have learnt after taking care of that bug and reading other articles on the internet.

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