The author emphasizes the first picture (which shows Misultin delivering 3X the throughput of a Node.js server), but I think the most interesting picture is the Response Times (picture #3). Look at the purple and yellow lines. When Node.js starts overloading at 3000 reqs/sec, the average response time drops to ~300 ms (just guessing, I'm not good at reading log graphs). But when Mochiweb starts overloading at 5000 reqs/sec, the average response time is around ~50ms.
In other words, the slowest of the Erlang servers has twice the throughput of Node.js, and handles server overload much more gracefully (at least in this contrived example).
In other words, the slowest of the Erlang servers has twice the throughput of Node.js, and handles server overload much more gracefully (at least in this contrived example).