I have done both in Ruby, and addressing it was not a big problem. E.g. my MSc. involved doing a lot of statistics and image processing in Ruby, and solving the performance bottlenecks meant rewriting about ~30 lines or so in C using Ruby Inline. Later I did map tile rendering on demand handling thousands of layers uploaded by customers in Ruby. Both using 1.8.x, btw. - far slower than current versions.

It took more CPU than if we'd rewritten the core of it in something else, but it let us iterate the rendering engine itself much faster, and most of the expensive computations were done by extensions in C anyway (e.g. GDAL and the like).

Of course you can find areas where it's still not viable, but my experience is that if you start by prototyping in whichever high level language - no matter how slow - that is most productive for you, you'll inevitably find you need to rewrite far less than you might think to get it fast enough. But more importantly: The parts you end up rewriting will very often be entirely different parts than what you expected, because being able to iterate your architecture quickly tends to make you end up in a very different place.

I know the argument, I don't buy into the argument (actually not a rubyist). Ruby just imposes some factor x on the performance as compared to Java roughly speaking. Which means you'll start a little earlier to look into queuing requests, distributing stuff in ruby as opposed to a java or go application. Nevertheless if we talk about scale, this is just a constant multiplier.

With a kafka queue, and worker nodes, compute-heavy jobs are easily distributed across many worker nodes.

For many parallel requests, you load-balance.

If the PostgreSQL or mysql table is the bottleneck (persistence layer), well this is actually a design decision thats orthogonal to the programming language (PostgreSQL won't scale better with a JDBC ORM).

Usually web applications fork and runs processes to do the computational work you describe (ffmpeg, imagemagick, git, etc). These are usually written in variety of fast(er) languages like C, C++, Java, etc. Plus now you get multicore scaling for free.