I'm really not subscribing to your argument that every other language got faster and ruby didn't. Ruby performance has increased significantly since 2003, and ruby has had concurrent IO using threads since 1.9. Python shares the GIL problem, and Node doesn't even have threads (have fun debugging events!), so you're not going to add much water to the argument in that department.

Additionally, computers got much faster and have many more cores, allowing for additional process concurrency. This is an argument for me to move to higher level, more abstract languages, not to race back to lower level languages because "they're fast". If anything, ruby/js/python aren't high level enough and could be slower but more productive. I'd choose that over raw performance for the vast majority of my needs.

Additionally, Rails benchmarks might show ~100 hits per second (that's 8,640,000 hits per day per process, do you actually get that much traffic?), but I can get thousands of hits per second running Sinatra. I still think Rails is plenty fast, but it's silly to blame a language for a framework.

Ruby has for years been a victim of FUD, opinions on it's performance that seem to have been derived from fuzzy stereotypes rather than actual information. I think that's what the author is frustrated about, because that's the one thing I'm pretty frustrated about too. I'll be the first person to abandon ruby when a better language comes out for my needs, but I've still never seen it.