[bascule]

"There are so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot if you develop large realtime systems in Ruby (or any other language that includes a lot of blocking libraries)."

As opposed to doing I/O flow control in an asynchronous, callback-driven system? Have you ever heard of the "slow consumer problem"?

Not only can you build realtime systems with threads, by using synchronous I/O you'll be taking advantage of all the flow control TCP has to offer, instead of unboundedly filling up write buffers.

[malandrew]

If you have the slow consumer problem then you start forking node.js into separate worker processes (via binary or counting semaphores) and do IPC via something like dnode (locally or even over something like seaport).