Edwin Fine wrote:
> This post may be stating the obvious, but here goes anyway... I hope I 
> am not preaching to the choir.
>
> First of all, the most important part of getting high performance is a 
> performance-oriented software and hardware architecture. Second of all, 
> at the code level, the selection of appropriate algorithms is crucial. 
> Finally comes the low-level code tuning.
>   
I'm not sure this is at all "stating the obvious". Still, the OP hasn't 
formally decided to switch from ColdFusion to Ruby, and is digging for 
low-level details on Ruby in general and web applications in particular. 
What this tells me is that 1 and 2 are already taken care of. As I noted 
in my post, I think the economic considerations are more important than 
the low-level details. How is a team with presumably many person-years 
of accumulated experience building scalable ColdFusion applications 
going to react when being asked to learn a whole new language and 
framework? Is the reduced cost of an open source platform over a 
commercial one enough of a motivation to put the team through that? I 
don't think you're preaching to the choir. I think what I'm saying is, 
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" :)

> In doing so, of course, you lose some (maybe a lot) of the portability 
> of the application, and probably maintainability, but that often happens 
> when you are aiming for extreme performance anyway.
>   
In many cases portability is not a requirement. More fundamental 
requirements are total cost of ownership and usability of the 
application. Performance figures into both total cost of ownership and 
application usability.

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.