Not much of a shocker. One thing to remeber with Node.js is that V8 is awesome when it comes to arithmetic operations. Numbers can typically be converted to native ints and all processes have native math instructions. Other JS objects however don't have true native equivalents, and their methods don't have native equivalent instructions, so the whole idea of converting them to machine code is a bit a stretch. Strings are somewhat of an exception because chars are after all just ints, and char/string functions are typically some form of arithmetic. Long story short, V8 is able to crunch numbers (and chars) without fluff, just pure raw machine instructions. Dumping 10,000 strings into a database however will show that node.js isn't always quicker then alternatives.