Exactly. Establishing 1 million connections is pretty easy in any language that supports async io, even scripting languages. The article is super-vague about the direction of the traffic, the nature and size of the messages and how much of the application is actually written in Ruby (vs. just being a glorified wrapper around redis and other systems written in c/c++) and the amount of work actually being done by the app. 179 requests per second is hardly something to brag about while you've completely saturated 8 cpu cores.