Should be possible just fine with NodeJS, so long as it's clustered to run an instance per core.

The order of magnitude(s) differentiator for server performance really comes down to whether or not the architecture is blocking or non-blocking.

We run about 20k connections per second with nodejs on a 12 core machine. All node is doing is parsing cached JSON, modifies it and serve it back to the client. One server has an uptime of 560days without any memory/performance issues.