A look at the language shootout (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...) shouldn't make this so surprising. OCaml is faster than Ruby (about 24x faster which, incidentally, is pretty close to the 22x greater requests served).

But as someone who has done a lot of web applications and as many of you I'm sure feel: it doesn't matter how fast your web application runs. What matters is whether your database layer and the schema you're using scales.

I guess the only arena that I really care about performance in is the database/datastore arena. Plus, Ruby is getting better optimized. Ruby 1.9 should be a huge leap forward and while it won't beat OCaml, it will be much, much better. So, I guess I can't get too worried about a performance problem that's easily taken care of - unlike database performance problems which are a complete PITA!

Personally I think ruby is fast enough in most cases. I'd vote for lower memory usage though.

But the point is that ocaml brings so much more interesting tings to web application development and deploy than raw speed, though that helps too.

Nobody, anywhere, under any circumstances, has ever chosen Rails for the speed. So this is interesting, but not particularly useful.

read the comment number 5 for quick explanation.

What is needed to make something a "real" web framework? Ocsigen/Eliom does handle sessions, routing, page parameters, forms, continuation-based sites, templating and other things you'd expect from a web framework. The main thing Rails includes but Ocsigen/Eliom doesn't is an ORM.