In upgrading from Postres 8.2 to 8.3 we saw some crazy improvement with inserts. Check it. Selena Deckelmann our favorite Postgres person (and trusted consultant) explained that this was due to HOT. Nice! When we first ran it, we didn't believe it so we re-ran it a couple times before we believed it. Much rejoicing on that one.
With JRuby, were seeing impressive improvement between 1.1.3 and 1.1.5 in terms of speed & memory usage. I love watching big honkn' GCs. Check it 1.1.6RC1 isn't showing a whole lot of difference for TriSano in our testing yet. JRuby 1.1.6 Final is due next week. The JRuby project is on a pretty wicked trajectory. Exciting stuff. We really can't say enough about the JRuby guys.
TriSano uses Rails - we haven't had the chance to upgrade to Rails 2.2 yet, but we'll do that next year. That will be another exciting perf test to watch in terms of memory footprint given the multi-threadedness of 2.2. Exciting stuff.