[evoxed]

[As only a novice could...] But yeah, I've only recently gotten back in to Ruby because performance be damned, it's fun in its own way (to someone who doesn't do any programming for a living at least). Edit: though I'll freely admit that for my purposes, performance has yet to be much of an issue.

[slurgfest]

There is really nothing wrong with Python performance-wise, the bigger issues will be things like the speed of your database, what kinds of caching and algorithms you use, etc.

Maybe worry about recoding the whole thing in ASM (or something equally macho) when you find that you have a good working idea which is only really hampered by time differences measured in ns.

Most web apps do not require you to carry out ray tracing. For typical cases Python can indeed be pretty fast.

If you have the most fun using Ruby then use it, life is short