Event Machine is a library for Ruby that provides event-driven I/O. It uses the reactor pattern to achieve high scalability, performance, and stability. Event Machine powers the backends of many large sites by enabling asynchronous programming and handling many concurrent connections efficiently. It can be used with tools like Rails, Thin, Goliath, MongoDB, and RabbitMQ to build highly scalable web applications. Benchmarks show that using Event Machine can process many more requests per second than a traditional Rails app due to its asynchronous and non-blocking nature.