.NET and Node.JS – Performance Comparison

async.sortBy is for sorting the results of an array of asynchronous functions. It is not an asynchronous sort. Let's see how it fares with process.nextTick(function(){array.sort()}) (or better still, threads-a-gogo).

The author notes about himself:

> I work for Microsoft as a software engineer for Bing in Silicon Valley. My group specializes in building platform and experiences for consumers. ( http://www.salmanq.com/ )

I don't program in nodejs but this is wrong on so many levels. First an honest question: what exactly is it that nodejs is terrible at? Please define it.

Now granted every tool has its strengths and weaknesses this benchmark shows a very large difference in operations that aren't uncommon in web servers.

Sorting in memory should concern you, since caching happens in the memory. Again, I don't know the state of ORM technology in nodejs but any NHibernate user will be able to tell you that level 2 caches are a common thing and they will boost the benchmarks even further if you were to compare it to a nodejs stack.

The only scenario where I see nodejs faster and better than .NET are the very smallish script scenarios like a log receiver etc, where no state is needed and minimal memory footprint is required

Technologies are tools in a toolbox. The bigger your toolbox is, the more complex and wonderful things can be built. For any given problem there are a number of parameters involved: available resources (skillsets, fun factor, hardware platform, OS, budget restrictions), time to market, expectations on scalability/security, functional requirements and so on. Thinking that one tool is inherently more suited to all tasks and problems is the equivalent of the old saying about the hammer.

In terms of VM performance, nobody would doubt that .Net (or the JVM) would outperform V8; especially in number crunching. If anything, the benchmarks are only proving that Node.js is fast enough.

However, I would guess that typical Node.js apps would be better at handling concurrent connections than typical Asp.Net apps; since Asp.Net apps are not usually written in non-blocking style.