Speed up your Angular App Performance with Web Worker

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Are the heavy computations degrading your web app performance?

App Performance, the deciding factor in the success of a web application/website, is the major point of concern for both the developer as well as the user. Everyone desires an application that runs fast as well as is profoundly responsive. 

40% of users leave the website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.- Neil Patel

Considering the fact, the developers are searching for various tools and techniques to improve the performance of the application. Web Worker (Java Script) is one such tool in this area, which brings a considerable difference in the App performance. Javascript has evolved quite a lot in the past few years, which can be gauged through the performance of the Javascript applications running over the internet and this improved performance can be ascribed to the JavaScript Engine and APIs. 

However, despite the changes, the user still tends to face the problem of freezing UIs of the applications, which happens due to the heavy computations at the browser, leading to negative user experience. Web Worker proves to be the savior here, which regulates and guides the browser to process the tasks based on their sizes, i.e. larger ones in the background and the smaller ones such as basic user interactions in the front, allowing multiple threads to execute in parallel.

Doing this, Web Worker speeds up the App performance, hence, incorporating it into your app can prove to be a game-changer for your business. This article will guide you about the process of using Web Worker in your Angular Application and improve its performance. 

What is a Web Worker?

Web Worker is a JavaScript code that runs in the background without interfering with other JavaScript code running within the HTML and hampering the performance of the page. The performance of an application depends highly on the thread execution and because a browser is capable of running a single thread at a time, execution time is distributed among the threads which pretend to run in parallel i.e multithreading, slowing down its performance.

Web Worker, on the other contrary, does not pretend the parallel execution, rather works actually on the concept of multithreading, which creates a Worker Thread along with the main thread (DOM thread) of the browser. The javascript code is loaded on the Worker Thread which runs in parallel in the background, however in a different environment than the DOM thread where the DOM API does not exist, thereby restricting its access to the DOM objects, such as- Windows and Document objects. Hence, the main thread can look after the UI of the website and the Web Worker will take care of the large tasks in the background.

How to use Web Worker in Angular? 

Being executed in the HTML, Web Workers can be used to enhance the performance of any kind of application that runs on a browser, such as – PWA(Progressive Web Apps), SPAs, as well as websites. 

Let’s consider the implementation of a Web Worker in an Angular application. The best Angular version for using Web Worker is Angular 8 onwards, which comes with an Angular CLI tool, simplifying the web pack configuration and setup of the web workers. 

Let’s say your Angular Application calculates the factorial of a number, which is a recursive process, hence is a time taking computation. So, check out the steps to incorporate Web Worker in your Angular application and handle the computation without affecting the other threads.

Check out the step-by-step guide at Web Worker- The Secret Accelerator of Web Applications.