Let's shut that trope down right now. Ruby is slow, and Rails is slow, although they are both much better than it used to be. But this isn't bloat. Rails is a

Let's shut that trope down right now. Ruby is slow, and Rails is slow, although they are both much better than it used to be. But this isn't bloat. Rails is a large framework that provides moderately sensible defaults. The tradeoff of that is there's a lot of stuff in there which might not be used by every app. This, and the overall flexibility of the framework, can cause performance to suffer, and combined with Ruby's relatively lacklustre performance, that can cause big scaling problems. Twitter is a poor example though, given the somewhat unique problem space it's tackling. But - building a standard e-commerce or service site? No problem. Getting bigger? Add some hardware. Still not enough? Start customising the framework. Because it's a toolset, not a one-size-fits-all solution. And if you've got outsize scaling requirements, you are going to have to get your hands dirty.