[rodp]

While I agree Node.js isn't the right tool for any job -- just like anything else, really -- after reading his description of the problem, I can't shake off this feeling that the main issues he has with performance in this case have very little to do with Node itself. Parsing a huge JSON string in any language would block CPU for a while. This JSON then becomes a huge hash table in memory, so no wonder each process uses up a lot of RAM. I don't know how these rules are then used but it seems to me he might be better off trying to rethink how to do shared memory in this case before he simply blames Node for blocking CPU and wasting memory.

That said, I can imagine other languages (like Java or Go) could still end up being more efficient than Node.

[jonas21]

The issue isn't that it takes a long time to parse the JSON. It's that the server can't do anything else while it's parsing. In Java, for example, you could parse the JSON on a background thread without affecting your ability to serve requests.

Similarly, the memory issue isn't so much that a single copy of the table takes a lot of space, but rather that they need to store 4 copies of the table -- because they're running 4 different processes in order to utilize multiple cores.

Both of these issues are specific to nodejs.