Worker
background worker, web worker, service worker, worker threadDefinition
A unit of execution that runs beside the main one and takes work off it — in the browser, a Web Worker or Service Worker on its own thread; on the server, a process that consumes jobs from a queue so the request that enqueued them can answer at once; at the edge, a function that runs on every request (Cloudflare Workers)
The word carries three architectures and one idea: do not make the thing the user is waiting on also do the slow thing. This site has none of the three today. The e-mail send and the AI reindex are the two routes that would earn a queue and a worker first; Nuxt’s OG-image render is the one that already runs in a worker, which is why it can OOM the dev server on its own.
Whatever the reader is waiting for should be the only thing the request does. Everything else is a job, and a job belongs to a worker.