Ruby, as generally served with Rails, has historically been much slower than SQL-in-the-page PHP with APC/etc. One example[1], from 37 Signals back in 2009, sh

Ruby, as generally served with Rails, has historically been much slower than SQL-in-the-page PHP with APC/etc. One example[1], from 37 Signals back in 2009, showed a 320ms response time (gack!) with 9,000 requests per minute on 10 4vcpu/4gb VMs in a private cluster. Assuming they had a reasonably tuned storage subsystem, this is pretty terrible performance. That's about 150 requests per second for 10 VMs with 40 vcpus and 40gb RAM. However, that doesn't quite match up with the 320ms claim, which would have them pushing a little lower. I'll assume a rounding error. Things have gotten better in many cases, but hardware and scaling up and out is still the best way to improve rails performance. [1] https://37signals.com/svn/posts/1819-basecamp-now-with-more-vroom https://37signals.com/svn/posts/1819-basecamp-now-with-more-...