It's easy to confirm biases against wide-spread technologies.
HTTP is a teensy tiny bit more used than node.js
node.js on a ti-micro. Just not much horsepower on the back end.
Do you think the server would perform more effectively if they had enabled the Cluster configuration (assuming the server has multiple cores)?
I'm fairly new to toying around with Node, so i'd be interested to know if there are fairly obvious or simple reasons for poor performance here
that would certainly help but it's just not running on a very powerful server, it's nothing to do with the language.
Makes sense
It's nothing to do with the language, it's to do with the threading model. It's a much argued about topic nowadays: one approach give peace of mind to programmers, and the other one gives peace of mind to users.