Ruby is a famously slow programming language. It is probably etched in the brains of many developers as perhaps the slowest language of them all.

Yet, it was multiple times slower and running on hardware that was multiple times slower back when Ruby on Rails exploded in popularity in 2006.

Back then, it was "fast enough" for the use cases that mattered.

Today, in 2026, Ruby has generally surpassed the performance of Python and is on par with PHP.

In other words, it is still on the slower end of languages, but multiple times "fast enough".

Rails is a famously slow web framework.

Yet today, its total overhead per request in API mode is about a single millisecond.

That's like, probably faster than "fast enough".

You don't have to use Rails. You could use Rage.rb and forgo the wonders of ActiveRecord for something less abstracted, like Sequel, and reach 447,993 requests per second on the latest TechEmpower single query benchmark, or 28,381 requests per second on the multi query benchmark. Both of these results are within 30% of the performance of the best performing stacks in those benchmarks.

But even if you did use Rails, you could still potentially serve around 312 million requests per minute, like Shopify did last Black Friday.

Some have started to argue that Ruby is even getting kind of "fast". Though I personally think that would be an insulting claim to make to seriously performance-oriented programmers.

Let's just call it for what it is: Ruby is "fast enough".

It is, in fact, faster enough than it's ever been and keeps getting faster every year! ❤️