Here's something most Node.js developers don't realize: PM2's cluster module silently imposes a ~30% performance tax through hidden IPC coordination overhead. Every request pays this cost for master-worker communication, and most teams accept it as the price of scaling Node.js applications.
With Watt, we eliminated this overhead using SO_REUSEPORT, achieving 93% faster median latency by letting the Linux kernel handle load distribution directly—no master processes, no IPC, zero coordination cost.
In this talk, we'll walk through our production benchmarks on AWS EKS and show how Watt delivers not just raw performance, but also multithreaded SSR, distributed caching, full observability with Prometheus, and seamless horizontal scaling—all while dramatically reducing your infrastructure costs.