I’ve been working with large JSON objects in my application and noticed that both JSON.parse() and JSON.stringify() operations are blocking the main thread since they run synchronously.
This becomes problematic when dealing with huge datasets because it freezes the UI for several seconds. I’m looking for JavaScript libraries or methods that can handle JSON serialization and deserialization without blocking the event loop.
Has anyone found a reliable npm package or workaround that processes JSON operations asynchronously? I need something that works well with large data structures and doesn’t impact user experience.
Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks in advance!
check out the async-json library on npm. it chunks those big JSON tasks for ya. also, using JSON.parse inside a web worker with postMessage can keep the main thread free. it’s a solid way to handle big API responses without locking up the UI.
I encountered similar issues with large JSON files. To solve it, I started using setTimeout or requestIdleCallback to split the JSON parsing into smaller tasks, effectively preventing the UI from freezing. For even larger datasets, Web Workers are a great approach; they offload the parsing work from the main thread and allow for seamless user interaction. Additionally, transitioning to a streaming approach with pagination helped a lot by retrieving data in manageable chunks, thus improving overall performance.
Had this same issue and ended up using MessageChannel with dedicated workers for JSON stuff. Basically you send your data through a MessageChannel to a worker thread that does the parsing/stringifying, then sends back the result. What really helped was setting up a queue system - you can batch multiple JSON operations and process them one by one in the background. For huge objects, I’d pre-process the data structure first to figure out what actually needs parsing. That cuts down the workload big time. The thing I realized is you usually only need small chunks of those massive JSON structures at once anyway.