5 requests/second is "good life average"? While he certainly deserves a credit for trying to shoot conservatively, but such low numbers will only scare more people away.

Our slowest requests (with multiple SQL queries and nontrivial rhtml rendering) get served @25-30req/sec, while "regular", i.e. not heavy requests are served @60-120req/sec and we're certainly not "Rails sharks" having less than a year of real life experience and our server is a $850 Opteron box.