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Comment by jacobp100 | Hacker News Reader

This basically makes a rust server to do the routing, then uses the Boa JS engine to evaluate the JS to handle the route

With this approach, you might be able to do some multithreading to improve the throughput

However, each request is almost guaranteed to be slower because V8 will be faster than Boa

You could also achieve this by spinning up multiple NodeJS instances and putting an nginx server in front to do load balancing - which is pretty standard practice

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On the nginx point — totally agree that nginx + multiple Node instances is a well-understood and effective setup. Titan isn’t trying to replace that pattern or compete with it directly. The motivation is removing Node from production entirely and shipping a single native Rust binary with a constrained runtime surface. That also enables a true multi-threaded execution model at the server level, rather than relying on process-level scaling. In environments where that matters — simpler deployment, embedded or edge use cases, tighter control over concurrency and memory — the trade-offs look different.

> You could also achieve this by spinning up multiple NodeJS instances and putting an nginx server in front to do load balancing - which is pretty standard practice

How does it compare in terms of HW resources?

I've done this in production plenty of times. Under load, nginx is insanely efficient. Practically all the CPU time ends up spent in your nodejs application server.

The worst part of a setup like this is deployment. There's just a lot of little moving pieces - like nginx needs to keep track of which frontend servers are up and which are down. How are you doing load balancing? You want to have websocket connections? That makes it more complex. How do you deploy code? Etc. Its great, but its not at all simple. Configuring nginx feels like its a little puzzle all of its own.

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