“Rails has this wonderful caching system that compensates for Ruby’s slow execution speed called “page caching” and “fragment caching”. Rails uses this to transfer the actual web traffic from Rails to the web server itself. […] Because of this a Rails application many times can outperform similar applications in Java or PHP.”
Zed on Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and More – O’Reilly Ruby
funny… Mr.Zed describes exactly the reason why some eight years ago, the CoreMedia Generator ™ was designed the way it is. The only difference being that the immature and slow language at the time was Java.
Just like Apple kept arguing “we don’t need fast CPUs because what you want works fast enough”, until they finally solved their performance problem.