What I don't get is why is it that Node is dog slow. Seriously it seems borderline unusable.

In terms of perf, Node has a pretty snappy JIT, and seems to perform OK in the browser, but this seems like something's not right here.

~200ms requests even in the light case are on the very brink of barely acceptable.

On the other hand, Python performs very well, but it's alarming to see it gets slower in every release by a significant margin.