Moral of the story first: developers, please take a look at Erlang.
I cringed when I read the story. Someone calls Node.js a magic when it handles 10k connections. Erlang handles 1MM connections without sweating.
Why? Because around two years ago I have created an Erlang server which does broadcasts of ~500bytes message to up to 1MM of concurrent users with a end-to-end delivery delay of at most 1.5 seconds, using ONE physical server and ONE application server (i.e. just one Erlang VM instance)!
Proof: https://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/Krakow2011/speakers/GlebPeregud
TL;DR. Node.js is not magic. It's not as scalable nor as robust compared to Erlang.