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by Ruby on Rails is a fast growing language and framework upon which modern web applications are being rolled out. However, despite its surging popularity, it continues to struggle with speed issues which has been one Ruby on Rail’s few stumbling blocks to garner an even more widespread user base. Tim Bray, the co-creator of XML and an advocate of Ruby on Rails, spoke in his keynote about Ruby performing up to twenty times slower than Java which is already scoffed at performance wise. Speakers at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference discussed how the root cause of the lagging performance has yet to be determined. In the meantime, Ruby on Rails developers are left to optimizing and thinning their code along with utilizing every performance trick imaginable in order to eek out that extra edge of speed to compete with their PHP and .Net competitors.
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The Java bashing is inaccurate by scottb :: NR7 :: Show
I take exception to the bit about Java being "already scoffed at performance wise".
Anybody who knows the details about Java’s performance knows that the performance of the JIT compilers distributed with every production-grade JVM make Java’s performance quite comparable to native code. Usually within a few percent.
This is especially true in a web-server environment, where virtually all of the code rapidly becomes resident, compiled binaries… exactly the environment in which Rails runs. So, saying Rails is twenty times slower than Java is pretty much the same as saying it’s twenty times slower than native binaries.
Moreover, since Rails is noted as competing with PHP and .NET, we ought to take note that those perform no better, and often worse than Java.
Finally, engineering – including engineering software – is always about tradeoffs. Space vs time, run time vs compile time, and so on. One advantage Rails has over PHP and .NET is that a Rails app can often be developed and delivered in far less time than a comparable PHP or .NET app. So you’ve got a tradeoff to consider – develop in PHP and spend more on programmers, or develop in Rails and spend more on production hardware.
Software rarely ever reaches "done". Most systems – again, especially web systems – are getting constant revisions, so those programmer costs aren’t a fixed cost, one-time thing, they’re ongoing. For one full time programmer, you can get about a half-dozen dedicated web servers at a hosting facility, so it can easily be a legitimate tradeoff.