[Rails] Performance question about ruby/rails

I have a program I'd like to write and I'd like to get off of Java and
start using something more productive. I have played around with
Rails, and I think I could the same app in a fraction of the time.

There's one part of the app though that I am not if Rails/Ruby would
be a good fit... so I'd like to get some expert advice on this one
portion.

There's one part of the application that needs to check a thesaurus
about 100 or 200 times per request. There might be a lot of these
requests. There is also a grammar checker that is going to be used
(although I need to find one that works with Ruby).

I can imagine that these are some very expensive requests. In the java
world, I can simply put the thesaurus and grammar checker (with rules)
entirely in memory as Java beans in a spring container. When the app
starts up, we initialize these two services and they just stay in
memory, waiting for requests.

When user requests come in that need to use the thesaurus or grammar
checker, they happen extremely quickly because they are just sitting
in memory the entire time.

Since Ruby is a scripted language, does that mean this would not be
possible? Would there be a way to make these extremely performant
using the Rails paradigm? Or is this a bad fit for Ruby and Rails?

Thank you.

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