One of the things I did was write a defer function (ie process.nextTick) and just threw it anywhere I thought some operation could potentially be blocking. This

One of the things I did was write a defer function (ie process.nextTick) and just threw it anywhere I thought some operation could potentially be blocking. This requires an analysis of latency vs bandwidth for your application (for me, extra latency was acceptable and bandwidth was at a premium). This also allows use of underscore libraries, albeit with extra defer calls everywhere. Unfortunately I could not convince my old company to use node.js in production because I was very curious to see how the extra function call overhead compared against the extra bandwidth. On another note, I was surprised that the eventEmitter callbacks are not executed asynchronously. I assumed each one was run on the next tick. That always struck me as inconsistent with the rest of the API.