
A quick calculation: assuming that each thread potentially has an accompanying 2 MB of memory with it, running on a system with 8 GB of RAM puts us at a theoretical maximum of 4000 concurrent connections (calculations taken from Michael Abernethy’s article “Just what is Node.js?”, published on IBM developerWorks in 2011; unfortunately, the article is not available anymore), plus the cost of context-switching between threads. That’s the scenario you typically deal with in traditional web-serving techniques. By avoiding all that, Node.js achieves scalability levels of over 1M concurrent connections, and over 600k concurrent websockets connections.