Why do people say that Ruby is slow?

Posted by stephen murdoch on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by stephen murdoch
Published on 2010-03-27T15:40:06Z Indexed on 2010/03/27 15:43 UTC
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ruby

I like Ruby on Rails and I use it for all my web development projects. A few years ago there was a lot of talk about Rails being a memory hog and about how it didn't scale very well but these suggestions were put to bed by Gregg Pollack here.

Lately though, I've been hearing people saying that Ruby itself is slow.

Why is Ruby considered slow?

I do not find Ruby to be slow but then again, I'm just using it to make simple CRUD apps and company blogs. What sort of projects would I need to be doing before I find Ruby becoming slow? Or is this slowness just something that affects all programming languages?

What are your options as a Ruby programmer if you want to deal with this "slowness"?
Which version of Ruby would best suit an application like Stack Overflow where speed is critical and traffic is intense?

The questions are subjective, and I realise that architectural setup (EC2 vs standalone servers etc) makes a big difference but I'd like to hear what people think about Ruby being slow.

Finally, I can't find much news on Ruby 2.0 - I take it we're a good few years away from that then?

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