Is making sequential HTTP requests a blocking operation in node?

Normally, I/O in node.js are non-blocking. You can test this out by making several requests simultaneously to your server. For example, if each request takes 1 second to process, a blocking server would take 2 seconds to process 2 simultaneous requests but a non-blocking server would take just a bit more than 1 second to process both requests.

However, you can deliberately make requests blocking by using the sync-request module instead of request. Obviously, that's not recommended for servers.

Here's a bit of code to demonstrate the difference between blocking and non-blocking I/O:

var req = require('request');
var sync = require('sync-request');

// Load example.com N times (yes, it's a real website):
var N = 10;

console.log('BLOCKING test ==========');
var start = new Date().valueOf();
for (var i=0;i<N;i++) {
    var res = sync('GET','http://www.example.com')
    console.log('Downloaded ' + res.getBody().length + ' bytes');
}
var end = new Date().valueOf();
console.log('Total time: ' + (end-start) + 'ms');

console.log('NON-BLOCKING test ======');
var loaded = 0;
var start = new Date().valueOf();
for (var i=0;i<N;i++) {
    req('http://www.example.com',function( err, response, body ) {
        loaded++;
        console.log('Downloaded ' + body.length + ' bytes');
        if (loaded == N) {
            var end = new Date().valueOf();
            console.log('Total time: ' + (end-start) + 'ms');
        }
    })
}

Running the code above you'll see the non-blocking test takes roughly the same amount of time to process all requests as it does for a single request (for example, if you set N = 10, the non-blocking code executes 10 times faster than the blocking code). This clearly illustrates that the requests are non-blocking.

Additional answer:

You also mentioned that you're worried about your process being CPU intensive. But in your code, you're not benchmarking CPU utility. You're mixing both network request time (I/O, which we know is non-blocking) and CPU process time. To measure how much time the request is in blocking mode, change your code to this:

async.waterfall([
    function(cb) {
        request(someUrl1, function(err, res, body) {
            console.time('1');
            // load and parse the given web page.
            console.timeEnd('1');
            // make a callback with data parsed from the web page
        });
    },
    function(someParameters, cb) {
        request({url: someUrl2, method: 'POST', form: {/* data */}}, function(err, res, body) {
            console.time('2');
            // more computation
            console.timeEnd('2');

            // make a callback with a session cookie given by the visited url
        });
    },
    function(jar, cb) {
        request({url: someUrl3, method: 'GET', jar: jar /* cookie from the previous callback */}, function(err, res, body) {
            console.time('3');
            // do more parsing + computation
            console.timeEnd('3');
            // make another callback with the results
        });
    },
    function(moreParameters, cb) {
        request({url: someUrl4, method: 'POST', jar: jar, form : {/*data*/}}, function(err, res, body) {
            console.time('4');
            // some more computation.
            console.timeEnd('4');

            // make final callback
        });
    }
], function (err, result) {
    res.status(200).send();
});

Your code only blocks in the "more computation" parts. So you can completely ignore any time spent waiting for the other parts to execute. In fact, that's exactly how node can serve multiple requests concurrently. While waiting for the other parts to call the respective callbacks (you mention that it may take up to 1 second) node can execute other javascript code and handle other requests.