Hongli Lai has compared a dummy scaffold application from Rails 1.2 to Rails 2.0 and found the latter to be 30-50% faster. That’s great to see.
But what I think is even more interesting is the progress we’ve been making on performance optimizations for more substantial applications. Rails 2.0 made a lot of progress for applications with lots of assets and for ones with big routes.rb files. The forthcoming Rails 2.1 will move things forward even further.
UPDATE: Hongli also investigated memory consumption on 1.2 vs 2.0 and found 2.0 to be significantly slimmer. Nice!