In case you guys missed it, there was a recent HN article on the speed improvements in jruby + jdk 1.7. I too lament the slowness of Rails - and before you throw the usual arguments at me about perf being relative and 'good enough' blah blah - the ruby/rails community should have seriously addressed this _long_ ago. I've only started with rails recently (this year) and am experimenting with jruby since my patience has worn thing with ruby's speed.