I am trying to convince myself to pick it up and start developing with it, but I want to know if anyone has expected stability issues or anything of the sort.
I understand it isn't "production" quality, like Apache or IIS. I figure for a small site, it should be fine (max of 200 concurrent connections). Should I assume this?
Plurk.com uses Node.js for their Comet engine, they have a fairly high traffic load too.
Since node.js has not been around long enough to have satisfied the greater community that it's stable and secure, many production deployments use Apache or nginx as a web server that proxies http requests to node running on a different port that is not accessible from the machine's public IP address.
Also forever may be able to help with the node stability issue.
Not a direct answer to your question but very related in terms of hosting node.js apps: two Heroku-like providers using node.js/JavaScript instead of Ruby, both in the beta/invite stage (as of mid-March 2011):
Looks like they pulled off some success stories from big companies. A good sign.
NodeJS.org now promotes articles from major companies Microsoft, eBay, LinkedIn and Yahoo.
I wonder what Google will do... They may already have evented I/O worked out behind the scenes. Or maybe they are just biding their time before they put their good name behind a product.
I use it as a reverse proxy in front of my sites - none are obscenely busy sites, but my image portfolio gets a lot of traffic.
I've not seen any random strangeness, crashes, or reliability issues to date.
