We are planning to start a fairly complex web-portal which is expected to attract good local traffic and I've been told by my boss to consider/analyse node.js for the serve side. I think scalability and multi-core support can be handled with an Nginx or Cherokee up in the front.

1) Is this node.js ready for some serious/big business?

2) Does this 'event/asynchronous' paradigm on server side has the potential to support the heavy traffic and data operation ? considering the fact that 'everything' is being processed in a single thread and all the live connections would be lost if it got crashed (though its easy to restart).

3) What are the advantages of event based programming compared to thread based style ? or vice-versa. (I know of higher cost associated with thread switching but hardware can be squeezed with event model.)

Following are interesting but contradicting (to some extent) papers:-

1) http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_html

2) http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rtm/papers/dabek:event.pdf