One note on database time. If you're loading multiple related records, Ecto is able to do some of those requests concurrently. For example, if you get a user and their posts and comments, the fetch of user happens, and then posts and comments can be fetched concurrently.

Also, when I used rails, quite a bit of time was spent wrapping the data into active record objects, whereas Ecto returns simple data structures, which seems to be much faster.