I've toed this line for a long time, but concern about performance is really starting to be an issue for me when I make a decision about what language/framework

I've toed this line for a long time, but concern about performance is really starting to be an issue for me when I make a decision about what language/framework to use. Here's my line of thinking: " If another language can provide 10x more performance in 2x the code of Ruby, that's a tradeoff I'd seriously consider. If I do ever have a hit on my hands, and it starts scaling quickly, there's a cost, management, and maintenance issue to bottlenecking myself with Ruby. " I realize that there are many parts to a system and that other parts encounter scaling considerations before the programming language does - ie database. However, it seems there are known, quick to implement solutions that can solve the data scaling problem in a cost effective manner. Reimplementing my application logic with another language seems to be a very cost-ineffective and time consuming task. I'd rather head that concern off at the pass by picking that language with 10x the performance and 2x the amount of code.