Ruby (and Rails) scalability?

Recently I wrote about Node.jsperformance, comparing it to my (still non-public, sorry!) Objective-C based libµhttp wrapper and Apache on my main development machine of the time, a MacBook Pro.

Node.js did really well on tasks that have lots of concurrent requests that are mostly waiting, did OK on basic static serving tasks and not so well on compute-intensive tasks.

Having developed an interest in minimal web-servers, I wondered how Sinatra and, by association, Ruby on Rails would do.

For Sinatra I used the scanty blog engine and the basic "Hello World" example:

---

require 'sinatra'

get '/hi' do
  "Hello World!"
end

---

For Ruby on Rails, I used the blog tutorial "out of the box", invoking it with "rails s" to start the server. In addition I also had RoR just serving a static file instead of the database-backed blog. All this on my new dev machine, a 2011 MacBook Air with 1.8 GHz Intel Core i7 and 4 GB of DRAM. I also discovered that httperf is a much better benchmark program for my needs than ab. I used it with 100 requests per connection, a burst length of 100 and a sufficient number of connections to get stable results without taking all day.

Platform	# requests/sec
Apache	5884
Sinatra Hello World	357
Ruby on Rails static page	312
Sinatra scanty blog	101
Ruby on Rails blog	17

This seems really slow, even when doing virtually nothing, and absolutely abysmal when using the typical RoR setup, serving records from an SQL database via templates. I distinctly remember my G5 serving in the thousands of requests/s using WebObjects 6-7 years ago.

Is this considered normal or am I doing something wrong?