We're looking into moving to unicorn as the community has suggested. If anyone is interested in setting up Puma or Goliath, we'd be interested in testing those out as well.

For something like the query tests where you're IO-bound, Puma is going to annihilate the competition. For CPU-bound tests like JSON generation, unicorn with multiple workers is going to perform better.

It's worth noting that Rails' default JSON solution is the compatible-everywhere pure-Ruby JSON generator. Using a drop-in replacement like the oj gem will drastically improve throughput there.

I didn't get to the pull request for this round, but tweaking the GC parameters for the Ruby install should dramatically improve the general performance of the non-JRuby Ruby tests, as well. I'll see if I can get a PR in. :)

Well yes please do this, not sure if it is allowed though since Oj gem is written in C ( I think )

So is the mysql2 driver (at least the slow parts), and Passenger is C++. C extensions are a common part of your standard Ruby deployment stack.