[qazxcvbnm]

One thing that surprised me about Node was how slow the default way to shelling out (child_process) could be (probably https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/14917).

Although according to the linked issue, it has been "fixed", I still ran into a problem during a batch script that was calling imagemagick through a shell for each file in a massive directory; profiling was telling me that starting (not completing) (yes, I was using the async version) the child process increasingly slows, from sub-millisecond for the first few spawns, to eventually hundreds of milliseconds or seconds... Eventually I had to resort to doing only single spawn of a bash script that in turn did all the shelling out.

It seems that the linked execa still relies on child_process and therefore has the same issue. It saddens me to see the only package for node that appears to actually fix this and provide a workaround seems to be https://github.com/TritonDataCenter/node-spawn-async and unmaintained.

[kvakil]

I worked on that Node.js issue. If you can share a repro, I'd love to take a look: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/new?assignees=&labels=...

[qazxcvbnm]

That's very kind of you - I tried making a dead-simple repro just now with Node 20, and it seemed to run without the problem. I'll try reproducing it in a bit with my original use case of imagemagick and see if the issue still exists.