[jerf]

"Sorry, what's the platonic ideal you're suggesting as an alternative?"

Something like Yaws, built in Erlang. With fine-grain threading that works well, you don't get the one-to-one OS process to task mapping.

But that certainly comes with its own set of tradeoffs. There are some workloads where that can be a massive win, but committing to any of the currently still-obscure languages/runtimes that can pull this off with panache means you're committing to a less-well-developed library environment.

Facebook chat runs on Erlang for a reason... and the rest of Facebook runs on PHP, also for a reason.