You can just as easily say RoR is slower (than, say, Symfony 2.0 on PHP with an opcode cache) and harder to work with (from a system administration perspective).
Take a look down the top 100 website list, and of those sites that are web applications, more of them will be built on PHP than not. I don't think there's even a Ruby application among the top 100 sites except parts of Twitter, but I could be forgetting something.
- Facebook
- Yahoo! (Answers, Bookmarks, Delicious, etc)
- Wikipedia
- WordPress (.com application is #19, another 14 million active installs of the free software)
- Flickr
It may not be cool right now, but it's certainly practical.
Take a look down the top 100 website list, and of those sites that are web applications, more of them will be built on PHP than not. I don't think there's even a Ruby application among the top 100 sites except parts of Twitter, but I could be forgetting something.
- Facebook
- Yahoo! (Answers, Bookmarks, Delicious, etc)
- Wikipedia
- WordPress (.com application is #19, another 14 million active installs of the free software)
- Flickr
It may not be cool right now, but it's certainly practical.