Node.js web app vs Java Web App (Spring MVC on Tomcat 6)

I am trying to rewrite a Java Web App written on Spring MVC 3 which uses a tomcat server.

The web app serves to handle rest requests from a mobile phone app. The Java web app also has a front end rendering pages in JSP.

Now I have begun on node using the express-framework. Now can I expect a node-app to perform better than a Java web-app ? How do I go about stress testing the two and arrive at a conclusion ?

Following are the typical requests my web-app must handle

1. Fetch paginated records from the database
2. Obtain the great circular distance between two geo points, passed as parameters to the rest service