What are the advantages of using a worker in non-cluster environments?

[jcano]

I was having a look at the code, in the hopes of learning good practices I can use in my own projects and maybe be able to help develop nodeBB if I improve my skills a bit. While I'm familiar with workers and clustering, I fail to see what's the advantage of forking a process for a single process deployment and keep all the event handling.

Wouldn't it be more efficient, to have just a single process spawned at the beginning of the script and remove all the event handling?