Some fellow name TAKAI Naoto has posted an interesting comparison of JRuby on Rails running under WEBrick versus running under AsyncWeb:

TAKAI Naoto compares WEBrick and AsyncWeb and a comical translation.

Although the numbers he shows for WEBrick seem *awfully* slow (4-6 seconds per request...we haven't been that slow since JavaOne running Rails in "development" mode) what's most interesting is the speed gains he gets from AsyncWeb: something like a five times improvement. If we assume there would be an improvement running a more recent JRuby (0.9.1 should be considerably faster than all previous versions) and running Rails in production mode...well, this thing starts to look real-world ready.

He has a link to a snapshot...I'm investigating that now and will update this post when I know more.

See also Takai's post about about JRuby on Rails running under AsyncWeb:

TAKAI Naoto running JRuby on Rails with AsyncWeb and translation.

These sorts of things show real promise...AsyncWeb scales extremely well and is built upon Java's NIO library. A new contender enters the Rails front-ending competition!

Update: Ok, I've spent five minutes looking at the code, and it's cooler than I thought. He's got AsyncWeb and JRuby on Rails wired together using Spring, and it's a trivial amount of code to do it...like less code than WEBrick. I hope he's able to get a release out for this soon.

Here's a direct link to his rails-asyncweb snapshot. Super cool.