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).