The JVM is slower to develop for, and when probably 50% of projects on the web are stuff that's built in less than 2 months, using the JVM adds too much complexity where it really isn't needed.
If you want speed (almost) as good as the JVM without using an interpreted language, use Node. Unless of course you only know the one language from your CompSci days..
Source? That's not what the Programming Language Benchmark Game says...
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-programming-lang...
Although that's probably without an optimiser at all.
I can't find the reference I remember but it fits roughly with the link posted (the scale seems to match the max times rather the average times). The differences were tiny but the order was PHP, Python, Ruby if I remember correctly (PHP was in front, PR may have been switched).
I'll try get a link but I doubt i'll find it.
PyPy is at least as fast as Node, and Rubinius is also very fast.