How about its running speed?
The short answer to the question in the subject is: Absolutely.
The overall execution speed is less likely to be a bottleneck on a site
with heavy db usage because the db, in that scenario, often becomes the
bottleneck.
However, to address the basic issue of running speed, I have sites running
on Ruby 1.8.x that are completely dynamically rendered, with all content
coming out of the database, and everything, including the navigation,
constucted dynamically based on the db content.
These sites are running on a 100% ruby based stack (no Apache, lighttpd,
nginx, etc... involved), and can do on the order of 1100 dynamically
created page views per second through a single backend process. A cluster
of three backend processes does around 2700-2800 r/s. I get those speeds
because I don't go back into the database itself on every request, so they
serve to illustrate what kind of performance a person can get when the
bottleneck is NOT the database. Ruby speed shouldn't be a problem when
addressing the scalability of a large dynamic web site.
Kirk Haines