It was about maybe late last year/Jan this year. When you say intermediate language, do you mean PHP has a bytecode interpreter instead of AST? At the time I looked at it, to convince myself there was no issue with Ruby, I actually hooked up the same table/query to PHP and used PHP's excellent profiling tools, then compared those to the Rails profiler. There wasn't a great difference. PHP was faster sure, but there was definitely no knocking Ruby's speed.