It can be argued that if it's mostly a glue language translating requests into db queries and db responses into HTML it doesn't need to be blazingly fast. Alth

It can be argued that if it's mostly a glue language translating requests into db queries and db responses into HTML it doesn't need to be blazingly fast. Although that does rather define the shape of the application to look a certain way. You can certainly do a lot more with a faster backend language. Not everything translates well to a database query. Throwing more hardware at the problem doesn't get around this.