Scalability, latency, and throughput are key performance indicators for web servers. Keeping the latency low and the throughput high while scaling up and out is not easy. Node.Js is a JavaScript runtime environment that achieves low latency and high throughput by taking a “non-blocking” approach to serving requests. In other words, Node.Js wastes no time or resources on waiting for I/O requests to return.
In the traditional approach to creating web servers, for each incoming request or connection the server spawns a new thread of execution or even forks a new process to handle the request and send a response. Conceptually, this makes perfect sense, but in practice it incurs a great deal of overhead.