For the exact same algorithm of moderate complexity, there should be less than an order of magnitude of performance difference between any languages, from a hig

For the exact same algorithm of moderate complexity, there should be less than an order of magnitude of performance difference between any languages, from a high-level language like Ruby to hand-coded assembly. Performance issues come from blocking and bottlenecks, not programming language choice. Waiting on database queries, waiting on networks, waiting on disk - those hurt. Using O(n^2) algorithms when O(n log n) or O(1) could be used hurts. Bad indexing on data sources hurts. Handling excessive or redundant data hurts. Threads that could be doing work getting blocked (or deadlocked) by other threads that could get out of the way in a better architecture - that hurts. Programming languages, that's nothing. And in Ruby's case, even that limit can be addressed. Ditch the perceived inefficiencies of the Ruby interpreter in favor of JRuby running on the highly tuned JVM, and see if things are faster.