The major benefits were persistant connections and background fetching of data - a lot of my requests serve data directly from local memory instead of hitting local or shared caches and databases.

The equivalent in .NET I guess would be BackgroundWorkers that are independently prefetching the data required most of the time but I could never get them to Just Work.

Specifically for my use case 99+ percent of requests receive some data, do some light manipulations and then push the data to redis about 8,000 to 12,000 times a second. With .NET I could only push to locally running software instances because anything remote couldn't keep up with the connection volume (without throwing even more hardware at the problem).

Interesting. Thanks for the answer. I'm a little surprised that .NET can't juggle network connections very well but in retrospect, I probably shouldn't be.

I think it's just whatever .NET's doing to pool them that has some tiny bit of overhead that doesn't matter most of the time.