I usually see arguments like this about language performance, but do people also argue about the difference from having a server process launch, configure itsel

I usually see arguments like this about language performance, but do people also argue about the difference from having a server process launch, configure itself, and stay open handling requests, like Ruby or Node.js, versus re-running initialization on each request like PHP? A lot of that initialization code is hooking together objects, reading misc config flags, and setting up request routing. But what about ORM? Ruby's ActiveRecord has to query the database for a schema, right? In PHP that query would be done every request rather than just once when the server restarts. Could this architecture issue have a larger performance impact than the minor differences in Python / PHP / Javascript / Ruby performance? (There were also plenty of discussions about event-based programming versus blocking + multi-threading back when Node was becoming popular. That is another example of architecture being more important than execution speed.)