[moe]

I don't really care if my app only manages 5000 requests per second, versus framework x's 6000 or more on the same hardware.

Nitpick: Your numbers are a little off. Rails/REE tops out at around ~300 reqs/sec on a current commodity box (16 cores/16G). This is of course application-dependent and optimization can squeeze it some, but it's a different ballpark.

When you look outside of ruby-land you can indeed find frameworks that will handle your 6000/sec on the same hardware (e.g. twisted, node, some of the evented java-frameworks).

So, depending on what you compare to rails, the difference can easily be an order of magnitude.

[cvshepherd]

When you use Metal endpoints, as i mentioned in my comment, 6000 requests per second is actually very possible. Yes, you need a lot of resources, but I didn't suggest otherwise. And yes, on this hardware other frameworks will manage even more requests.

EDIT: My low budget netbook just gave me 327 req/s with an out of the box Rails config, and running the benchmarking tool on the same machine.