Half of the Ruby that I write is not web applications - it's scripts that configure servers, import and export data, optimise a manual process, etc. Ruby is perfectly performant in those scenarios.

It's become a horrible meme I can run a script that reformats a 30 line CSV file the way I want it in 0.05s and someone will almost certainly lean over and say "Ruby is too slow, you really need to upgrade to <x>". Or the intranet application I wrote in Sinatra last year for a total of four users, where all I got questions about how it could be usable without "asynchronous".

That said, I don't understand Ruby's performance position. IBM released a preview of their JIT implementation over a year ago, with much fanfare. By many accounts, it held major practical improvements. Since then, I haven't heard a thing about it, and the Ruby team seem to be spending years talking about implementing the same thing.