[jondubois]

Yeah I guess I'm mostly thinking of a typical REST API workload where you just query a database, maybe do some small transformations to the data and then send it to clients.

Also, it'd have to be a server with good async support like Node.js, Go, Haskell, Scala, Tornado, nginx...

Considering that the speaker is CTO at a CDN company (which has to deal with a lot of different kinds of back-ends that are outside of their control), it makes sense that they would need to use and algorithm which can handle all possible scenarios - They can't force their customers to use bigger servers and more efficient systems.