1) I honestly have not seen a ratio that high for a web service. Most of the hot points of serving a web request through Ruby are actually written in C, so on t

1) I honestly have not seen a ratio that high for a web service. Most of the hot points of serving a web request through Ruby are actually written in C, so on the same machine I can only serve about 2x as many simple JSON requests through Gin as Sinatra. Once you add in waiting on IO for a DB call this gap gets narrower until it basically disappears. What blows it out to 40x? Some sort of live image/sound manipulation? If it was an inherent problem with Ruby, you wouldn't see such fantastic performance from nginx_mruby. 2) Sure, the Go connection pool is nice, but the Go ORMs are horrible as they try and work around the warts of the language. Everything's a trade-off, really. You give up terseness and flexibility for performance. 3) The GIL is definitely not convenient when thinking about code. Threads in Ruby still require you to write thread safe code. The GIL exists to make the _Ruby VM_ simpler. Otherwise you end up in the situation of Lua, where you have to re-initialize the VM in every thread and essentially have sub-interpreters, or you build something incredibly complex like the JVM. The 2.1+ GC usually spends less than 1% of time in collection. That's fast by any language standard. The next step for Ruby will be a method JIT. There are two promising method JITs in development using LLVM as a backend. Images shouldn't be served through a dynamic web app regardless of your language. They should be served directly via a web server to a cache/CDN, even if you're generating them on the fly like dynamically composed map tiles. People pan away. They pan back. You don't want to regenerate the tile.