Ruby is often described as a DSL for web services and the popularity of frameworks such as Rails and Merb is a clear sign of success of the language. However, there is also the ongoing concern of scalability and performance of Ruby based web applications. In this talk we will investigate the challenges and dispel the myths around the Ruby networking stack: working with Ruby sockets, synchronous & async polling techniques, reactor loop pattern (EventMachine), and working with epoll, kqueue, and others.