I've started tinkering with Node.js HTTP server and really like to write server side Javascript but something is keeping me from starting to use Node.js for my web application.

I understand the whole async I/O concept but I'm somewhat concerned about the edge cases where procedural code is very CPU intensive such as image manipulation or sorting large data sets.

As I understand it, the server will be very fast for simple web page requests such as viewing a listing of users or viewing a blog post. However, if I want to write very CPU intensive code (in the admin back end for example) that generates graphics or resizes thousands of images, the request will be very slow (a few seconds). Since this code is not async, every requests coming to the server during those few seconds will be blocked until my slow request is done.

One suggestion was to use Web Workers for CPU intensive tasks. However, I'm afraid web workers will make it hard to write clean code since it works by including a separate JS file. What if the CPU intensive code is located in an object's method? It kind of sucks to write a JS file for every method that is CPU intensive.

Another suggestion was to spawn a child process, but that makes the code even less maintainable.

Any suggestions to overcome this (perceived) obstacle? How do you write clean object oriented code with Node.js while making sure CPU heavy tasks are executed async?