Start a Node cluster by simply running start-cluster.

By default, npm start runs your application as a single instance via node server.js.

On production, it's best to run multiple instances (i.e. an instance per CPU core) so that, when the application crashes or throws exceptions, other instances can field subsequent requests while the erroneous one restarts.

Otherwise, requests will fail until server.listen() is executed. For sufficiently large applications with several dependencies, this can potentially be seconds.

$ npm install start-cluster --save

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "start-cluster"
  }
}

If your server script is located elsewhere:

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "start-cluster src/server.min.js"
  }
}

MIT License 2015 © Eric Clemmons