TechEmpower uses Unicorn because it's the fastest MRI based rack server solution.
In JRuby, you have a few more high performance options, and Torquebox 4 is nearly as fast as Go in Hello World.
That being said, the only benchmark that matters is how your app performs on your tech stack. Anyone can write a slow DB query that ruins performance.
I imagine that that issue is highly overrated for most companies.
"web latency research user conversion rate" on google will turn up a ton.
Heck, back in 2004, ten years ago, you only got two seconds: http://cba.unl.edu/research/articles/548/download.pdf
Now 1 second http://www.australianscience.com.au/research/google/34439.pd...
Even that causes losses: http://www.tagman.com/mdp-blog/2012/03/just-one-second-delay...
Google sees significant effects at 200ms: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/speed-matters.htm...
blah blah blah.
Feel free to find things that say the opposite, i've never seen a study that says "users will choose the slower service, if it's 'better', they just don't give a crap".
And sure there is a diminishing return, but if your latency times are 1s or greater for a web based service, you are almost 100% guaranteed to be losing users/conversions/etc.
Joel Spolsky mentioned how StackOverflow only needed 3 servers to run it for a really long time, because it was coded in a compiled language. [1]
People have already demonstrated how Go can be used on the server: http://blog.iron.io/2013/03/how-we-went-from-30-servers-to-2...
At best one can conclude that concerns about performance aren't as important as other considerations which make Rails/Django more attractive. My opinion is that these other considerations are more along the lines of cost of labor and ease of learning than anything else.
I see a few other languages higher than that.
You can also filter out languages you don't care about by using the filters panel (click the "Show filters panel" button).
https://github.com/treefrogframework/treefrog-framework/blob...
On the other hand, there is Google Web Toolkit which lets you write both client and server code in Java, which is very close to C++ in performance, and compiles the client code to very efficient javascript. (CSS is also compiled into being very efficient.) http://www.gwtproject.org/overview.html