Thanks for the link.
I guess I'm trying to figure out why there's so much excitement about a server that is not designed to spread the workload to multiple cores for you.
I guess I'm trying to figure out why there's so much excitement about a server that is not designed to spread the workload to multiple cores for you.
1) Javascript is a nice, powerful language. It's easy to find JS programmers. Bonus: you can share code between the server and browser.
2) Node provides a clean slate for server-side web dev: fresh, largely asynchronous libraries delivered via a well-designed package manager (npm) that I don't cry when I have to use.
3) It's an accessible way to program asynchronous server-side TCP/IP applications. Socket.io (WebSocket sever with multiple transports to fallback to) is an example of why this is useful.
The lack of interprocess communication that would help parallelize tasks between cores is the one thing that's lacking. AFAIK there are plans to address this (although given Erlang's maturity it will likely still be superior for this use-case) but even without that Node is very, very useful to many people right now.
If you've got a CPU bound problem, you might farm that out to something else.