“Node is the best of both worlds. We get JavaScript, which is uniquely suited to this kind of evented programming, but we get the performance too.”

When he first built Voxer, Ranney ran a test to see how many connections he could open a single server. “I just decided to open as many connections as I could, just to see where things would fall down,” Ranney says. “With Node, I could open, well, all of them. I couldn’t open any more connections without getting more IP addresses on my test machine. Node uses such small amounts of memory, it’s astounding. I ran out of port numbers.”

via The Node Ahead: JavaScript leaps from browser into future • The Register.