The author emphasizes the first picture (which shows Misultin delivering 3X the throughput of a Node.js server), but I think the most interesting picture is the

The author emphasizes the first picture (which shows Misultin delivering 3X the throughput of a Node.js server), but I think the most interesting picture is the Response Times (picture #3). Look at the purple and yellow lines. When Node.js starts overloading at 3000 reqs/sec, the average response time drops to ~300 ms (just guessing, I'm not good at reading log graphs). But when Mochiweb starts overloading at 5000 reqs/sec, the average response time is around ~50ms. In other words, the slowest of the Erlang servers has twice the throughput of Node.js, and handles server overload much more gracefully (at least in this contrived example).