It's hard to benchmark these things with accuracy and impartiality, but there's not a significant gap between them anymore. For example (see JRuby here):
I just ran an identical-technique-almost-identical-code recursive fibonacci benchmark against Python 2.6.1, Ruby 1.9.2, and JRuby 1.6.1 and got times of 17.4s, 7s, and 3.2s respectively. (Undoubtedly you could find benchmarks where Python wins, but this is an interesting test of a common algorithm nonetheless.)
Perhaps in real world tests there are places where performance can be made up, but at its core, Python isn't showing much improvement over Ruby nowadays until you start to use things like PyPy (which is, I admit, totally awesome).
It's hard to benchmark these things with accuracy and impartiality, but there's not a significant gap between them anymore. For example (see JRuby here):
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...
I just ran an identical-technique-almost-identical-code recursive fibonacci benchmark against Python 2.6.1, Ruby 1.9.2, and JRuby 1.6.1 and got times of 17.4s, 7s, and 3.2s respectively. (Undoubtedly you could find benchmarks where Python wins, but this is an interesting test of a common algorithm nonetheless.)
Perhaps in real world tests there are places where performance can be made up, but at its core, Python isn't showing much improvement over Ruby nowadays until you start to use things like PyPy (which is, I admit, totally awesome).