> ... and if streams become a better and better option as response sizes get larger and larger. The streams syntax is nicer looking in any case.

fs.readFile(...) reads the entire contents of the file into memory. For small files that may be acceptable but if you're dealing with anything that could be large it's not going to be very pleasant or even work properly.

I just tried it out on my laptop for a 100MB and a 1GB file. For a 100MB file using streams is about 25% slower. However the sync method failed for the 1GB file:

    Style            100MB       1GB
    =====            =====       ===
    fs.readFileSync  .176s    <failed>
    streams/pipe     .234s      1.25s