I currently work at a company with a monolithic Rails app that we are looking to break into a SOA and port parts of it to other, more efficient stacks. Part of

I currently work at a company with a monolithic Rails app that we are looking to break into a SOA and port parts of it to other, more efficient stacks. Part of the problem with Ruby is that you really need to throw massive hardware at it to get it to scale in the 2-3K requests/sec range that other stacks can reach with more commodity hardware. Depending on your situation, this may be something you're ready and able to do and may solve your scaling problems better than switching stacks. But if you're really trying to scale on low end hardware or virtual servers to minimize complexity/cost, Rails can be a challenge. At Twitter/AirBnB scale it just becomes ridiculous.