Ruby On Rails is slow...?

I'm writing a web application to monitor a furniture factory production flow. It has thousand of data to handle. So far, I run RoR on Mongrel + MySQL and it's really really slow (2-4min for some views). When I look at RoR logs, it seems that database queries aren't slow (0-10ms).

Is RoR slow when it converts database data to object? Is Mongrel slow?

Edit: First thing: I was in dev. env. In the production environment, the slowest view takes 2min (which would turn down to less than 1min on a good computer, mine is 5 years old). With ruby-prof and a bit of common sense, I've found out which methods were slowing down the application. The problem is that single SQL queries are called in loops on larges datasets:

ofs = Ofkb.find_by_sql ["..some large SQL query..."]

for of in ofs # About 700-1000 elements
   ops = Operation.find(..the single query..)
   etc.
end

Here are ruby-prof results on those methods:

 %self     total     self     wait    child    calls  name
 32.19     97.91    97.91     0.00     0.00       55  IO#gets (ruby_runtime:0}
 28.31     86.39    86.08     0.00     0.32    32128  Mysql#query (ruby_runtime:0}
  6.14     18.66    18.66     0.00     0.00    12432  IO#write (ruby_runtime:0}
  0.80      2.53     2.42     0.00     0.11    32122  Mysql::Result#each_hash (ruby_runtime:0}

The problem is: I can't really avoid those single queries. I've got thousands of events from which I have to compute complex data. Right now I'm using memcached on those methods which are OK unless you're the first to request the page.

Solution

I'll agree with everyone else. You have to profile. There is no point in doing anything to your code until you know what specifically is causing the slowness. Trying to fixing a problem without understanding the cause is like feeling ill and deciding to have lots of surgery until you feel better. Diagnose your problem first. It might be something small like a network setting or it could be one bad line in your code.

Some tips for profiling:

How to Profile Your Rails Application

Performance Testing Rails Applications

At the Forge - Profiling Rails Applications

Once you have found the bottleneck you can figure out what to do.

I recommend these videos: Railslab Scaling Rails

Revised now based on prof results:

OK. Now that you can see that your problem is that you are doing some sort of calculation using a query based on looping through the results of another active record query I'd advise you to look into building a custom SQL statement combining your initial selection criteria and the loop calculation to get what you need. You can definitely speed this up by optimizing the SQL.