This is totally not the right benchmark for comparison. Node's JS execution is single threaded, and it's well known that it's not the appropriate choice of platform for CPU-bound workloads. Its main selling points are high concurrency in terms of number of network connections, event based design, and JavaScript as a programming environment. While it may be fairly good at doing computation because of V8's strong optimizations (it compiles JS functions to x86 assembly - JVM does similar things) it is not good at also sustaining high concurrency in the process. Those CPU bound operations will block everything else until they're done unless you code your functions to yield and cooperatively multitask.