Don't compare Erlang to Node.js. Erlang is not a good implementation of evented servers. I'm not saying that Erlang is a bad implementation of evented servers,

Don't compare Erlang to Node.js. Erlang is not a good implementation of evented servers. I'm not saying that Erlang is a bad implementation of evented servers, I'm saying that Erlang doesn't implement the evented architecture at all. Instead Erlang with its lightweight processes is more similar to the plain old 1-thread-per-IO-channel worker model except Erlang can spawn many more processes than the OS can spawn OS threads. Not that there's anything wrong with this; Erlang's processes are so lightweight that you can essentially get the same amount of scalability as evented servers. The advantage of Node.js over Erlang is that it makes scalable I/O available in a mainstream high-level language. I do not call Erlang mainstream. Although I do think Node.js is a bit overhyped; Ruby's EventMachine and Python's Twisted provide similar functionality, and in particular EventMachine is extremely well-written.