Node js can help you in several ways. Here is a small fast presentation on what it designed to do.

1. What can nodeJS do for you?
by stormcreatives.com

2. Why this presentation ..?
After a very succesfull project where we used node.js
I decided to make it de-facto standard in the company.
so one night I decided to force feed my team node.js
I was meet with resistance and cold pizza

3. Some of the Questions the team had :
• When should we use this in our architecture?!
• is it any good, there is so many JS frameworks out there?
• Who uses this, Case studies please..
• Im scared!

4. What is node.js ?
• is a command-line tool that can be run as a
regular web server and lets one run JavaScript
programs
• Uses theV8 JS engine
• is very good when you need to do several
things at the same time
• is event-based so all the wonderful Ajax-like
stuff can be done on the server side
• Use with MySQL, Mongodb

5. I/O is our slow friend
So the largest waste with current programming technologies
comes from waiting for I/O to complete.
There are several ways in which one can deal with the
performance impact.
Node.js is not multithreaded, because threads and processes
carry a heavy memory consumption. They are single-
threaded, but event-based. This eliminates the overhead
created by thousands of threads/processes by handling many
connections in a single thread
If you are looking for truly multithreaded action check out
http://jxcore.com/home/

6. Node.js
is suited for applications where you'd like to maintain a persistent connection from
the browser back to the server.
Using a technique known as "long-polling", you can write an application that sends
updates to the user in real time. Doing long polling on many of the web's giants,
like Ruby on Rails or Django, would create immense load on the server, because
each active client eats up one server process.

7. Node.js
is suited for applications where you'd like to maintain a persistent connection from
the browser back to the server.
Using a technique known as "long-polling", you can write an application that sends
updates to the user in real time. Doing long polling on many of the web's giants,
like Ruby on Rails or Django, would create immense load on the server, because
each active client eats up one server process.

8. Node.js
is suited for applications where you'd like to maintain a persistent connection from
the browser back to the server.
Using a technique known as "long-polling", you can write an application that sends
updates to the user in real time. Doing long polling on many of the web's giants,
like Ruby on Rails or Django, would create immense load on the server, because
each active client eats up one server process.