Comparing "hello world" on EC2 Micro between node and nginx, why node so slow?

I've hit the need to put a load balancer in front of some Node.js servers and I decided to compare Nginx and Node.js

To do this test I simply spun up an Ec2 Micro (running Ubuntu 14.04) and installed Nginx and Node.js

My nginx.conf file is:

user www-data;
worker_processes 1;
pid /run/nginx.pid;

http {
    server {
            listen 443 ssl;
            return 200 "hello world!";
            ssl_certificate     /home/bitnami/server.crt;
            ssl_certificate_key /home/bitnami/server.key;
    }
}

events {
    worker_connections 768;
}

And my Node.js code is:

var http = require('https');
var fs = require('fs');
var serverOptions = {
                key: fs.readFileSync("/home/bitnami/server.key"),
                cert: fs.readFileSync("/home/bitnami/server.crt")
        };
http.createServer(serverOptions,function (req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
  res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(443);
console.log('Server running');

I then used another EC2 server (m3.medium due to memory needs) to run wrk with the command

./wrk -t12 -c400 -d30s https://ec2-54-190-184-119.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com

The end result was that Nginx could consistently pump through 5x more reqs/second than Node.js (12,748 vs 2,458), while using less memory (both were CPU limited).

My question is, since I'm not exactly great/experienced/knowledgeable in server admin or setup, am I doing something to severely mess up Node.js? And can I confidently draw the conclusion that in this situation, Nginx is absolutely the better choice?