That chart is pretty misleading - it's basically comparing OS threads to event-based processing, which is really likely to be a win for the event-based system. It's also several years old at this point. Erlang is neat, but to be really, really fast, he probably wants to be working in C. Who knows though... the 'specs' are awfully vague. Erlang might be an interesting choice for some kinds of apps of this kind.