Node.js is single threaded. To use the capacity of multi CPU environments clustering is needed. There are solutions already available, so just have a quick look at one of them.

throng is the name of the package, accepts a function to initialize an instance and options, in the following example it requires the app.js. The first important option is the amount of instances. For Heroku use the environment variable WEB_CONCURRENCY contains of amount of CPUs or total ram / ram per instance. For other environments the fallback is the amount of CPUs. The second important option is the lifetime of each instance.

require('throng')(
    () => require('./app'),
    {
        workers: process.env.WEB_CONCURRENCY,
        lifetime: Infinity
    }
);

Now we use this cluster.js in the npm start definition. For local development, we define a user script which starts only one instance of the application (e.g. with nodemon watching and restarting on changes).

{
  "main": "app.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node cluster.js",
    "start-watch": "nodemon --watch app.js"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "throng": "^1.0.0"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "nodemon": "^1.3.7"
  }
}

Summary

Clustering in multi CPU environments must be handled by the application itself, but can easily supported with already available solutions and less effort.