In the database? About 90% of bottlenecks boil down to something along the lines of "this query is slow" or "there are a lot of queries here". This has been true since the dotcom boom
The whole rise of memcached and NoSQL should pretty clearly indicate that many developers are finding their database to be the bottleneck.
There's much less of a push for high performance languages, even though there are many that are also quite nice to work with (eg, Clojure). Since this is a Python discussion, searching for "Django PyPy" and "Django NoSQL" should be instructive.
You're combining a false dichotomy with snark, which really shouldn't have a place here on HN.
Those are fairly uselss synthetic benchmarks. How many apps do you have in production that are purely key value stores with a random access profile?
And if you really have these performance characteristics (hint: it's unlikely), maybe it's time to get a edge caching CDN? Cutting 400ms of latency as you cross from Amsterdam to California is going to be the easiest performance boost you ever got
The point of these benchmarks is that, given the same database and the same queries, languages have different performance profiles.
If I build an application in Java and Python, with the same database backend, running the exact same set of SQL queries, the Java application should perform better.
If you look at those benchmarks, for the same db queries on the same db backend, throughput and latency can differ by an order of magnitude. We're talking the difference between 200 or 2000 requests per second, or 50ms vs 500ms latency. That's not a rounding error.