I seriously recommend that you re-look your stack. Java is simply the most performant (RAM and CPU) stack vs Rails in a pure apples-to-apples comparison. The t

I seriously recommend that you re-look your stack. Java is simply the most performant (RAM and CPU) stack vs Rails in a pure apples-to-apples comparison. The two stacks you have compared are apples to watermelons - here are a couple of questions: 1. Why both Tomcat and Jboss ? Choose one or the other. In fact for the best performance you can run your application on Jetty. 2. Mysql vs Oracle ? you need to compare equally. I hope you do realize that JDBC/JNDI are perfectly compatible with Mysql - more so, since they are the same business entity. 3. Lighttpd vs Apache is again an unfair comparison. You can perfectly run Lighttpd in front of Tomcat. I seriously suggest you re-evaluate Java if you are purely looking for performance. Developer productivity is a whole different story altogether.