Is it me or is 1000 requests per minute a laughable goal? That's 16.6 requests per second, i.e. 60ms per request _without any parallisation_. I'd expect any unoptimised app to be able to reach that goal.
Maybe if you read the first paragraph you'd find out
Article is actually quite good, but it seems Rails is really slow. Twitter 2007 is said to be at 300ms/req. Others come in around 100ms. So it would seem that you don't get 16RPS without some effort.