Timers and process.nextTick() are core concepts of Nodejs. It is important to undestand and be familiar with these and use them with ease. setTimeout(callback, 0), setImmediate(callback) and process.nextTick(callback) appear to be doing the same thing. I have tried to make this concept easier to understand.

Code Snippet

Let’s look at a code snippet first:

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setTimeout(() => { 
  process.nextTick(() => {
    console.log('setTimeout --> nextTick');
  });
  console.log('setTimeout');
}, 0);

setImmediate(() => {
  process.nextTick(() => {
    console.log('setImmediate --> nextTick');
  });
  console.log('setImmediate');
});

process.nextTick(() => {
  console.log('nextTick');
});

console.log('hello timers and process.nextTick()');

What do you think the output will be? Let us try to figure out….

setImmediate() and setTimeout() are similar, but behave in different ways depending on when they are called.

setImmediate() is designed to execute a script once the current poll phase completes.

setTimeout() schedules a script to be run after a minimum threshold in ms has elapsed.

If both the timers are called within an I/O cycle, the immediate callback is always executed first else the execution order is non-deterministic and depends on the performance of the process. Read more here…

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# Non-deterministic execution order

setTimeout(() => {
  console.log('timeout');
}, 0);

setImmediate(() => {
  console.log('immediate');
});

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# immediate callback will be executed first always

const fs = require('fs');

fs.readFile(__filename, () => {
  setTimeout(() => {
    console.log('timeout');
  }, 0);
  setImmediate(() => {
    console.log('immediate');
  });
});

process.nextTick() takes a callback and adds it to nextTickQueue and will be processed after the current operation is completed, regardless of the current phase of the event loop. Any time you call process.nextTick() in a given phase, all callbacks passed to process.nextTick() will be resolved before the event loop continues.

Given this understanding, can you now guess the output of code snippet

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hello timers and process.nextTick()
nextTick
setTimeout
setTimeout --> nextTick
setImmediate
setImmediate --> nextTick

Conclusion

They all appear to do the same thing but one should use them depending on the situation. I would strongly recommend to read Understand Event Loop in Nodejs for better understanding.

The official documentation states:

We recommend that developers use setImmediate() in all cases because it’s easier to think about.

process.nextTick() can potentially cause I/O starvation and hence should be used responsibly. I hope you enjoyed reading this and find it helpful. I sincerely request for your feedback. You can follow me on twitter @lifeClicks25.