>Node uses single application thread and uses ansynchronous scheduling to IO bound operations to distributed load....

Thank you for your that explanation, Rick. Most helpful and thought provoking. This very clearly clarifies the position of node.js from a strategic point of view, exactly what I was trying to find out.

Sounds to me like node.js may be a good fit for dealing with simple AJAX requests as long as they don't involve any complicated processing. Of course the next thought, bearing in mind this is quite a major drawback, is whether node.js could become multi-threaded in a future version? This wouldn't mean leaving the whole Async paradigm behind, just allowing it to be configured to run multiple separate instances of node.js at the same time.

Could even make the number of live threads dynamic based upon server load - that was how I managed load when I was working on writing a VFP HTTP webserver, it changed both the number of instances of live requests allowed within each worker thread and the number of separate worker threads (each a separate .exe) based on the previous 30 seconds of load.

Nick