Here's an anecdote for you: our corporate intranet site gets a peak spike of a few thousand users every day, around lunch. (People browsing the web over lunch

Here's an anecdote for you: our corporate intranet site gets a peak spike of a few thousand users every day, around lunch. (People browsing the web over lunch and the computers in-house all have the site as their fixed homepage.) That web server is running separate from databases and other resources. It never sees load. We're using a static language, but even if ruby was 10x slower, it wouldn't matter. On the other hand, change the contents of a stored procedure so that it doesn't line up with indexing properly, and page load goes from >0.1s to <4s.