Indeed. And there is more than one way to do it. The most obvious thing is to write a Ruby C extension. But you could also write a totally separate worker proce

Indeed. And there is more than one way to do it. The most obvious thing is to write a Ruby C extension. But you could also write a totally separate worker process in the language of your choice and glue it to your main Ruby app with a message queue. In most real-world cases, either solution will get you the performance you need to avoid 10xing your servers.