Graeme has taken the time to respond to some of the comments floating about in the blogosphere about the performance of Grails vs Rails. This benchmarking comes out very favorably for Grails. In nearly every case, the requests per second and mean response time come out with Grails performing better than Rails. And in some cases, Grails literally blows Rails away (140 vs 35.5 requests/sec on the create test!!). The max response time for Grails is higher in nearly every test case, but this is completely understandable as Graeme points out. I also wonder if he took note of the fact that Grails is always going to be slower for the first hit, but over time will speed up due to the nature of the JVM.

It’s important to keep in mind that Grails has yet to be optimized much (or at all), whereas Rails has been around longer and has been optimized much more. This is the part that makes me feel the best, actually, because it means that there are probably a lot of places where relatively simple changes can improve the performance of a Grails app significantly. Add to that the fact that in Grails you can always drop down and write native Java to increase efficiency (vs. having to write C in Ruby/Rails) and I think it’s clear that Grails is at the very least on par with Rails and likely has even better performance characteristics.