My experience with the defaults in JavaScript is that they’re pretty slow. It’s really, really easy to hit the limits of an express app and for those limits to be in your app code. I’ve worked on JVM backed apps and they’re memory hungry (well, they require a reallocation for the JVM) and they’re slow to boot but once they’re going they are absolutely ripping fast and your far more likely to be bottlenecked by your DB long before you need to start doing any horizontal scaling.