you can just as easily spawn multiple node.js servers and kill off the unresponsive one's
There is even a cluster module built in now to remove the need for an extra external tool to manage the processes: http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/cluster.html (there are more fuller featured options available as extra modules, I'm not sure how they compare efficiency-wise with the in-built one). I'm guessing this isn't the way to go if the processes need to communicate, but I've not looked into it overly deeply yet (my experiments with node not having grown to the point of needing to take advantage of more than one core).