I work everyday with Rails.

In my experience, Ruby is not super slow.

In my machine, I can create 1M of empty hashs on 0.17sec.

  Benchmark.measure{1000000.times{Hash.new}}
  @total = 0.1706789999999998s

It's very good for a dynamic language.

But ActiveRecord (and Rails) are incredibly slow.

In my machine in 0.17sec only 2000 Models can be created.

  Benchmark.measure{2000.times{User.new}}
  @total = @total=0.17733399999999833.

Some SQL+Network runs in less than 10ms, in these cases Active Models creation is slower than that.

Yes, Rails can be slower than database access.