Lately, I’ve been consumed on a project I’m working on professionally that uses Ruby on Rails, but we have yet to deploy due to our administrator’s concern with Ruby’s processor utilization.
Typically we create everything in ASP.NET with C# and our administrator has forgotten how much CPU ASP, another interpreted framework, chewed up. Now they’ve become accustom to eight percent processor utilization during peak traffic and fear the server will go down because Ruby takes 25 to 30 percent per a request.
Add business decision makers to the equation and now you have the general consensus that a server can only handle 4 users before it will crash and burn.
If other shops are facing the same dilemma, I fear that all the productivity a team can gain from dynamic languages will be lost trying to prove ROI.