That's a terrible example, both because it has nothing to do with speed (your complaint is about scalability, not speed) and because it is wrong. Having a pool

That's a terrible example, both because it has nothing to do with speed (your complaint is about scalability, not speed) and because it is wrong. Having a pool of workers to handle requests while using event driven interfaces is normal now, and gives you the best of both worlds. Your theoretical attack works the same as it would on nginx: you'd need to run it out of file handles.