node is meant to be used in scenarios when you give most of the work to libuv. However, if you to CPU intensive work in JavaScript itself, such as:

- serialization

- encoding

- cryptography

- compression

- etc. ... then, you are better off doing it on a lower level language. express logger counts as a form of serialization, and therefore it is slow.

If you absolutely have to do CPU intensive work... then: limit per-tick execution time and break it down into multiple ticks, otherwise you will block the node event loop and your system will degrade until it stops processing requests.

Now, you can find this faster by profiling. Just use a profiler, like nodegrind or flame graphs or whatever, you will find those bottlenecks very quickly.