[zwigby]

The main application runs in a single thread and then I/O activities happen in an event loop running with a small thread pool.

Once one of those activities completes the event loop will give a signal to the main thread of the Node app and the callback will be executed.

Not sure if that helped or just confused everyone.

[oh_teh_meows]

So basically if you have an infinite loop in your app's one and only thread, none of the callbacks will happen because they have to run on that one thread?

[thedufer]

Yep. Similar to how an infinite loop in the browser will freeze up the page - the browser only gets to control to draw by putting a draw function in the event loop, so if you hog the thread, the page can't update.

[catnaroek]

Remember the "Node.js is Cancer" troll? It was pretty much about this.

[dsego]

Basically, yes.