It's just like "Replacing the blog software with HTML file I created myself with Notepad". Sometimes it will work, sometimes it wont.
If you will need two or more encoding jobs running in parallel, or to push video properties for each file to the site, you will get into trouble very soon, and 100 lines will grow to 10000.
If you are running Apache Tomcat (or anything based on Coyote), as I can see from headers, you are _already_ serving slower than Node. Just because Tomcat needs more time to parse and return the response than Node. Only Jetty with NIO connector has comparably high speed. (Yes, I've tested by myself).
And, JFYI, you have to move static content to nginx or lighthttpd, Coyote serves static files even worse than Apache web server.
All you say about functionality of the platform has no relation to the speed.
I performed mentioned tests by myself while doing a tech research for online gaming startup. The code for V8 benchmarks is open, and it is very generic, so you can easily perform tests by yourself and see the difference.
Rhino itself is very slow. Sometimes it is 50-100 times slower than node. You can check it by running some of benchmarks from V8 suite in node and Rhino runtimes (just save .js files and redefine listeners in the runner code): http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v5/run.html
While Java provides many solid and useful frameworks, you may have difficulties with them if you're not a Java guy.Node's module base, on the other hand, is very variegated and the code is awful sometimes (and lacks any documentation except README). But Node community is very responsive and open. Finding help with Java maybe a very complicated task.
> avg. salary IT (after tax) $700-1500/mth (mostly around $1000/mth)
$1000 is for a stydent, twenty-something HTML/PHP programmer or Windows admin.
Most companies offer >= $2000.
For senior developers (Java, Python, RoR etc) or DBAs $3000 is average. *nix/Cisco admin may expect $2000-$2500.
St.Petersburg's salaries are about 60-70% of Moscow equivalents. Other > 0.5M population cities - about 30-50%. Small cities - 25-30%.