Why is non-blocking IO radical? Tons of libraries and frameworks offered it much before node, including twisted, Java's NIO, and the entire System.Net namespace in .NET.
Other than that, surprisingly sensible advice.
Other than that, surprisingly sensible advice.
I'm actually using node for a side project right now as part of re-learning web development (been back-end the last few years), and using javascript as a client language, server language, and db query language via mongo is a neat environment. Also, npm rocks. But don't listen to anyone who tells you they use node+mongo to handle their WEB SCALE PERFORMANCE. If they really had that problem, they'd be better off using the java ecosystem or, if they really wanted to go hardcore, using a lot of C. But Java's unfashionable and C's ridiculous to write a web app.
AFAIK, Node's cluster API, which can spawn workers for each of a machine's cores, will, when delegating requests to a worker, factor in OS-level core utilization info.
Again, I'm not saying node sucks, I'm using it and I like it. I'm just saying if you really need to crank out performance, use java.util.concurrent, or maybe Go. They both offer event-driven i/o if you really want it, and have better threading models.