Very informative link, I don't really use PHP anymore but I was surprised to see Laravel is faster than Symfony though it uses many Symfony components.
Rails IS slow, but part of the reason it shows so poorly on that tests is a weird glitch in how unicorn and wrk interact. In my testing for the Ruby Web Benchmark Report (http://www.madebymarket.com/blog/dev/ruby-web-benchmark-repo...) I ran into pretty bizarre low performance on unicorn and wrk.
TechEmpower uses Unicorn because it's the fastest MRI based rack server solution.
In JRuby, you have a few more high performance options, and Torquebox 4 is nearly as fast as Go in Hello World.
That being said, the only benchmark that matters is how your app performs on your tech stack. Anyone can write a slow DB query that ruins performance.
Feel free to find things that say the opposite, i've never seen a study that says "users will choose the slower service, if it's 'better', they just don't give a crap".
And sure there is a diminishing return, but if your latency times are 1s or greater for a web based service, you are almost 100% guaranteed to be losing users/conversions/etc.
Actually, performance is quite important for scalability. A lot of sites written in Ruby / PHP have big scalability pains if they get popular. Twitter had to be re-written from Ruby to Java. Facebook had to completely rewrite PHP's compiler to make it close to a compiled / statically typed language.
Joel Spolsky mentioned how StackOverflow only needed 3 servers to run it for a really long time, because it was coded in a compiled language. [1]
It's nice to see how fast Go is already. It'll probably be a couple years ago, but it should improve once they start working on the optimizing compiler.
No, it doesn't imply anything at all about whether speed is a big deal or not.
At best one can conclude that concerns about performance aren't as important as other considerations which make Rails/Django more attractive. My opinion is that these other considerations are more along the lines of cost of labor and ease of learning than anything else.
That may be true, but the main point that's being ignored by such statements should always be mentioned: Django and the like in scripting languages offer an easy to use and fast to implement way of getting an idea off the ground. Once you really go beyond millions of requests, it should be also possible to hire Java developers then to rewrite the app for scaling beyond the tipping point of scripting language apps.
Go is pretty new and pretty dang high on that list. Which is nice to me. It also makes me want to give it a shot in a project. Are there any nice templating frameworks for Go - that would be pretty much the only thing to prevent me from using it. I need templates like I do in Django.
They haven't invested heavily into the optimizing the compiler. They're waiting until the entire compiler is rewritten from C to Go before they do the the work. Java's jvm has been heavily optimized and it's quite impressive.
i want to sort by performance, and see what language is used in each framework at the same time. the performance view has no language, and the table view has no sortable columns.
I don't see any mention of c++ being compiled to javascript. Without that, this seems to be server-only, not full stack.
On the other hand, there is Google Web Toolkit which lets you write both client and server code in Java, which is very close to C++ in performance, and compiles the client code to very efficient javascript. (CSS is also compiled into being very efficient.) http://www.gwtproject.org/overview.html
http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9