As a performance optimization I use stderr instead of console.log, for some reason stderr is much faster then stdout :P And console.log is slow as hell, mostly because it's sync, but also because it does a ton of stuff; parsing the parameters, etc.
And well, I am thinking you're talking about "much faster" for small amount of text (small enough to not fill the stdout buffer). Actually printing huge amount of text to stdout should be much faster than printing to stderr exactly because of this buffer.