From what I could tell, that spawns actual child processes and communicates with them over pipes. Fine from an architectural standpoint, but a penalty compared

From what I could tell, that spawns actual child processes and communicates with them over pipes. Fine from an architectural standpoint, but a penalty compared to shared memory from a performance standpoint. And it still has the problem of a single heavy CPU request on a given worker blocking all the requests behind it on that worker. Again, I'm not saying node sucks, I'm using it and I like it. I'm just saying if you really need to crank out performance, use java.util.concurrent, or maybe Go. They both offer event-driven i/o if you really want it, and have better threading models.