If you are a traditional SQL kinda person adequate record from tender love seems to offer some performance increases. There seem to be lots of effort to make some of the larger key pieces of rails faster.<p>I would't expect rails on it's own to get dramatically faster. The way it is going to get way faster is to strip out a lot of why to use rails and get closer to what we get from a pure rack app. The flip side is we lose a lot less off the top line speed see in benchmarking.<p>Using things like Russian doll caching and turbo links can make apps seem faster.<p>With some patience jruby and the right server setup rails can get a pretty big performance boost. For long running processes like web servers jruby can be a pretty big win for the ruby ecosystem.<p>There is some very thorough benchmarking done by Brian Knapp comparing different ruby runtime/server/framework combinations you can see here <a href="http://www.madebymarket.com/blog/dev/ruby-web-benchmark-report.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.madebymarket.com/blog/dev/ruby-web-benchmark-repo...</a>