Ruby on Rails vs Node.js

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

http://nodejs.org/



"...LinkedIn evaluated three possible solutions: Rails/Event Machine, Python/Twisted, and Node.js. According to Prasad, Node.js was eventually chosen providing a number of benefits:

Better performance, Node.js being up to 20x faster than Rails for certain scenarios
Using only 3 servers instead of 30, leaving room for a 10x traffic growth
Front-end JavaScript engineers could be used for back-end code, and the two teams were actually merged into one

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"After pinpointing some of the problems, Lan eventually admitted that “v8 is freaking fast” but added: “Don’t assume that you must build your next technology using node.js. It was definitely a better fit than Ruby on Rails for what the mobile server ended up doing, but it is not a performance panacea. You’re comparing a lower level server to a full stack web framework.”
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Reference: http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/10/Ruby-on-Rails-Node-js-LinkedIn