That would mean something if Ruby apps are 100% Ruby and/or are performing binary tree operations all the time, or doing similar kinds of CPU-intensive operations as depicted in the alioth benchmarks. But they don't. Ruby web apps perform lots of string manipulation, memory allocation, I/O. A lot of expensive things are offloaded to C libraries. Things like XML parsing are offloaded to native libraries like libxml; nobody uses an XML parser fully implemented in Ruby. Ruby does not reimplemented gzip compression in Ruby, it uses zlib. So the alioth benchmarks are not representative of real-world performance.
That benchmark performs string manipulations that rarely occur in web apps. Web apps need: concatenation, substring, find/replace, maybe with regexps. All of those are implemented in C.
> memory allocation
Web apps don't tend to implement entire trees in pure Ruby. That benchmark is completely non-representative of real-world performance.
What exactly are you getting at? Of course it's easy to find a bunch of synthetic benchmarks that show weaknesses in particular cases. Still doesn't prove anything.
It's only about 4x slower than pure C in this case, and only a little slower than Java which has a very good JIT.
> You don't seem to know what is shown on the benchmarks game website.
How funny of you to say that while acting as if the benchmarks "prove" Ruby is the ultimate spawn of the devil that eats away any and all performance. The website itself tells you not to jump to conclusions and that the app itself is the ultimate benchmark: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclus...