Here are some quick, unsophisticated benchmarks of a "Hello World" test web server. I ran it in our dev server (Centos 5.3 i386). Ran with ab -t 30 a few times

Here are some quick, unsophisticated benchmarks of a "Hello World" test web server. I ran it in our dev server (Centos 5.3 i386). Ran with ab -t 30 a few times and chose the fastest of the batch. Perl 5.14, Dancer 1.3040, HTTP::Server::PSGI: Requests per second: 856.48 [#/sec] (mean) Memory after tests: 11296 (VSZ) 7632 (RSS) Ruby 1.9.2, Sinatra 1.2.6, WEBRick 1.3.1: Requests per second: 402.72 [#/sec] (mean) Memory after tests: 20612 (VSZ) 10628 (RSS) I know. This is not, by any means, serious language benchmarks (ie. Sinatra, WEBRick, Dancer are interfering), but they give me a rough idea of how things can perform side-by-side for a given setup. I'm also a fan of running quick string management tests to roughly benchmark interpreters at a given servers, since most of our codebase do a lot of string manip. Here's a 1MB mem alloc + cat test: Ruby 1.9.2: $ time ruby -e 'x=""; (1..999999).each { x << "a" }' real 0m0.313s user 0m0.277s sys 0m0.026s Perl 5.14: $ time perl -E '$x.="a" for 1..999999' real 0m0.167s user 0m0.139s sys 0m0.020s As I said, this is completely unscientific. There are much better ways of benchmarking languages out there.