Java or Ruby, does it make a difference?

I'm writing a large scale financial application that I use mostly Java for. Now, to get some data, I need to write a small script (<200 LOC) to download CSV files (over 20,000 of the开发者_StackOverflow社区m) and store them to disk. I need this to be fast, but, a few minutes doesn't make a difference to me. I was planning to write it in Java which isn't very hard, but, I would be done a lot faster if I wrote it in Ruby, so I was wondering if there would be a large difference in speed between Ruby (or JRuby) and Java. The 20,000 files are all about 1/2 a megabyte, and the server I'm downloading from isn't keen to give away data (its completely legal, don't worry about that), so, my application has to randomly sleep in between, and, if the website denies a request, it has to sleep for 3 minutes.

Recommendations to any other easier-than-Java type of languages is welcome.

Use whatever makes you comfortable. Language implementation speed probably won't be an issue there, network speed and the sleeps you have to put in will be a bottleneck anyway.

Sounds like you app will be I/O bound, so the speed of the language is not terribly important

In a language like Ruby or Python, I would expect this to be more like 20 LOC or less. Especially since you have a limited request rate, there is no point using simultaneous connections to try to speed things up

If you have a bunch of machines with different ip addresses ( or one machine with several external addresses), you could split the job across those to speed things up since the rate limiting is usually by ip address

Where do your urls come from?