I have a case where a function with an asynchronous interface is far
more likely to complete synchronously than to actually do anything
asynchronous. In an earlier post (linked below) it looks like Ryan
suggests using process.nextTick to make the behavior of such functions
consistent, but that can make things really slow. In fact, from my
testing of the simplest case function that uses process.nextTick vs.
one that just immediately calls its callback, process.nextTick takes
more than 10x as long (which isn't really surprising).

Here is the earlier discussion on the topic:

http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/6fd56eb6cc...

What I'd really like to do is detect the stack depth and only use
process.nextTick when I'm past a certain threshold. This way, I can
have a really speedy implementation that still won't ever max out the
stack.

Is that possible? Is that horrible?

Thanks in advance!

--
Will Conant