In this case it was a technical comparison; the original poster stated, "php's performance was an order-to-two or magnitude better than rails".

If you are making a technical comparison then it needs to be at the correct layer of abstraction. If we were to compare performance of Laraval and Rails that would be a fair comparison.

If we are comparing on performance then PHP should be probably be compared to Ruby+Rack since that is sort of the lowest common denominator.

I'm not dogging on PHP here either. Even comparing at the correct level; PHP is still faster, but lets make sure we are making the right comparisons.