While it's never going to match compiled languages like C or Go, it's definitely the fastest interpreted language out there; I've seen studies putting it in the same order of magnitude as C (i.e it's 2x slower, not 10x). Moreover, its concurrency model (callbacks / event handlers) makes it uniquely suited to handle IO-bound workloads easily, which is 99% of the web nowadays (getting a request, sending a query to the database, and sending the reponse back).