TBH, we didn't have to do much performance tuning. The Meteor app we are building is heavy on the database CRUD (like real heavy) so there is not much to tune code-wise other than define good data structures for your db. And really, if you have to do any GC tune up for your node app, you really have to ask yourself if there's something you could do instead in your code first.

I must admit that initially it seemed that node js profiling sucks, but it's just that we are still not used to the internal intricacies of V8. When we did profile a couple of times (we use Webstorm so just used flag in the run config), there were too many things out of the context of our code showing up. I think if you show a snapshot of YourKit to someone who hasn't worked with JVM before they would have a similar reaction.