What are some examples of high performance Node.js apps?
Node was specifically built with performance in mind, which is one of the reasons it embraces the async I/O programming model so heavily. In addition, JavaScript runtimes such as v8 are some of the most optimized and engineered pieces of software ever made. Nevertheless it feels like most (non-web browser) JavaScript applications are pretty slow and resource inefficient.
What are some counter examples to this?
I'm not sure how you expect an answer when you don't define what things like "high performance" or "pretty slow and resource inefficient" even mean in your context.