But if you are talking about a stripped down Rails without ActiveRecord, we are looking at something on par with a Sinatra service. That is pretty lean already.

But if you are talking about a stripped down Rails without ActiveRecord, we are looking at something on par with a Sinatra service. That is pretty lean already. Compared to Rails you already have a big performance improvement. 5x overhead for a Ruby webservice on that level is decent. I wouldn't have expected much more.