filequeue

Filequeue
==============

$3

Filequeue was born out of my encounter with Error: EMFILE, too many open files, which occurs when you try to open too many files at once on your system. Due to Node's asynchronous nature, if you perform a lot of fs.readFile or similar operations in quick succession, you can easily hit your system's maxfiles limit, usually set to 256 on a dev box.

Filequeue creates a replacement for fs, that I use as fq with many of the same operations. However, it keeps track of how many files are open at once, and queues them if there are too many.

Installation
-------------

Through NPM
`` bash
$ npm install filequeue
`

or using Git
` bash
$ git clone git://github.com/treygriffith/filequeue.git node_modules/filequeue/
`

How to Use
-----------

#### Instantiate Filequeue with a maximim number of files to be opened at once (default is 200)

` javascript
var FileQueue = require('filequeue');
var fq = new FileQueue(100);

// additional instances will attempt to use the same instance (and therefore the same maxfiles) unless the newQueue is explicitly passed.

var FileQueue2 = require('filequeue');
var fq2 = new FileQueue(100);

console.log(fq === fq2); // => true
`

#### Use any of the following supported fs methods
* readFile
* writeFile
* readdir
* stat
* exists

` javascript
for(var i=0; i<1000; i++) {
fq.readFile('/somefile.txt', function(err, somefile) {
console.log("data from somefile.txt without crashing!", somefile);
});
}
``

Other Methods
-------------
Pull requests to add other fs methods are welcome - these are the methods I use most often, so I built in support for them.