I'm almost certain that you're hitting a cache when you load this site (I'm getting a 40ms ping to news.ycombinator.com, which would leave about 30ms to render

I'm almost certain that you're hitting a cache when you load this site (I'm getting a 40ms ping to news.ycombinator.com, which would leave about 30ms to render a page here, and these pages are complex enough that the DB query would be more than 30ms). Caching is a thing you can do with Rails, you know... Look, I spend a fair amount of time looking at the performance monitoring tools for the Rails apps I deal with. Ruby execution time just isn't that big of a deal most of the time. And when you have a monster of a page and it is an issue, you use caching, like you do with every other language/framework.