Running Next.js in Kubernetes should be simple: containerize, replicate, autoscale. But under real traffic — thousands of requests per second, CPU-bound workloads, unpredictable spikes — it’s not that simple.

In this episode of The Node (& More) Banter, Luca Maraschi and Matteo Collina unpack our latest benchmark showing Next.js running 93% faster with Watt compared to PM2 and traditional single-CPU pods. We go beyond charts to explain why the results happen, from Node.js event-loop behavior to Kubernetes load distribution and the Linux kernel’s SO_REUSEPORT.

We'll cover:

✅ How our benchmark harness works, simulating 1,000 requests per second to produce reliable, comparable results.

✅ The architectural differences between single-CPU pods, PM2 clusters, and kernel-balanced Watt pods.

✅ How latency, throughput, and failure rates interact — and the business impact of slow or failed requests.

✅ Why Watt’s approach eliminates bottlenecks and maintains near-perfect success under heavy load.

Benchmarks aren’t just numbers — they reveal how Node.js behaves under pressure. If you run Next.js or CPU-heavy Node.js in Kubernetes, this episode shows what’s slowing you down, why it happens, and how to fix it.