Exactly. You have the same sort of solutions for squeezing additional performance out of Python and Ruby: - using evented framework (network/IO bottleneck) - using native code (CPU bottleneck) - using a different implementation (Python has an edge here with PyPy, as long as your dependencies run on it)

Because numerical processing is a major use case, Python has a number of techniques to easily speed up critical sections of code (numpy, cython, pypy).

I am not aware of comparable features in Ruby.