[mstump]

This is sort of highlighted by other comments, but GC is only good at small quick requests. If you're dealing with large or slow requests it results in large or long lived allocations which causes havoc with GC. This is true for any generational GC, Java included.

Also node will only perform well if that IO is offloaded to the kernel or CPP code and behind a future via epoll etc... If it's in the actual node runtime it'll perform poorly because it'll block the thread.