async-rails

Comparing Node.js to Ruby on Rails is as useful as comparing apples to oranges. Node.js is not a web framework. Node.js has a wonderful paradigm for evented programming, but that does not mean you can not also have evented programming with Ruby or Rails. Take a look at http://github.com/igrigorik/async-rails or things related to http://github.com/eventmachine/eventmachine

Since this has come up a few times already: ab -c 5 -n 10 http://127.0.0.1:3000/widgets/http That's not a benchmark, it's a proof of concept: http://github.com/igrigorik/async-rails/blob/master/app/cont... /widgets/http makes an http request to /widgets, which does a 1s sleep query inside of mysql. All of this is happening on the same reactor loop, and finishes with ~2s, aka, the sleeps are not blocking the reactor and hence the "async stack".