[nirvdrum]

Doesn't basecamp do a ton of caching to achieve response times like that? There are certainly techniques to get there, but how long does it take to populate the caches? That's what you're going to see out of a stock Rails app.

Self-inflicted, sure. But in my experience it's the result of picking developer-friendly tools to optimize for developer time. Erubis is much faster than HAML, but a lot of developers prefer the latter. Those sorts of decisions accumulate.

[jashmatthews]

No more than Match.com do, who run on .NET. Basecamp just uses the standard Rails caching AFAIK.

Templating just isn't the issue now that it was in the days of 1.8. HAML is slower than ERB, but usually neither have a meaningful impact on response time on modern Ruby. ERB is approaching Erubis performance now.