Django gives you the benefits of speed and an easy to use framework. Rails just seems to have more hype around it. The people who constantly say that the poor

Django gives you the benefits of speed and an easy to use framework. Rails just seems to have more hype around it. The people who constantly say that the poor performance of Ruby and Rails isn't an issue are the same people who don't have large spikes in traffic, since their apps are subscription-based. For most of the typical Web 2.0 stuff getting built these days, huge spikes in traffic are exactly what you want, but using Rails is setting you up to have scaling issues once you get the press you're hoping for. You're likely to run into those same issues regardless, but why make things worse? Assuming Rails is better than Django, it's not so much better that it'll make up for the poor performance. The improvements in ease of development aren't unique to Rails, they're a byproduct of the philosophy that Django, Rails, and similar frameworks all share. I'm far more likely to trust the opinion of the Twitter folks than that of people who have something to gain from my choice of framework.