You've been deploying Node.js wrong. For years, the community has treated Node.js as a simple runtime—start a process, put it behind a reverse proxy, scale horizontally. But this approach ignores fundamental architectural problems that become painfully obvious in production: the single-threaded event loop bottleneck, inefficient resource utilization, fragmented tooling, and the operational complexity of managing multiple services.
In this talk, I'll make the case for why Node.js needs a proper application server—and why we built Watt to solve these problems. We'll go deep into the architecture: how SO_REUSEPORT enables kernel-level load distribution without IPC overhead, how multiple workers within a single deployment unit can achieve near-linear scaling, and how a unified runtime can orchestrate frontend frameworks like Next.js alongside backend microservices.
You'll see real benchmark data: 93% faster median latency compared to PM2 clusters, 99.8% reliability under sustained load, and dramatic reductions in infrastructure costs. More importantly, you'll understand why these improvements happen at the architectural level.
Whether you're running Next.js, Fastify, or any CPU-bound Node.js workload, you'll leave with a fundamentally different perspective on how Node.js applications should be built, deployed, and scaled.
No magic. No hype. Just better architecture.
This talk has been presented at Node Congress 2026, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.
