Yeah, I'm oversimplifying. However, compared to MRI, the JVM starts up quite slowly. Pile on JRuby et al and you end up with an even slower time to go. I think the JRuby people have been very focused on feature parity, interop, and bug fixes so I'm not sure they've prioritized startup time. For now, I'm happy with that, I don't restart my app that often, basically only on deploys.