Benchmark Shows Synchronous JSON.parse Freezes Node's Event Loop on a 10MB File

A developer tested three ways to parse a 10.4MB JSON file in Node.js, measuring whether the main thread stayed responsive during each parse. A plain synchronous read and parse blocked the event loop completely, with a 1ms timer recording zero ticks across three runs. Reading the file asynchronously did not help, since the synchronous parse that followed still froze the loop for roughly 71 to 84 milliseconds. Offloading the read and parse to a worker thread kept the timer firing over 160 times without dropped ticks. However, the worker approach added about 100 to 200 milliseconds of wall-clock time per parse, a tradeoff rather than a free improvement.