Rails 2.3.4 and Erubis 2.6.5, Speedup?

I am running Rails 2.3.4 with Phusion (AKA mod_rails) and Apache2 and
need
some significant speedup in rendering. E.g. a common operation takes
several
seconds (View: 2973, DB: 74). Googling turned up several posts on 2-3x
speeds
w/ Erubis compared to ERB from several years ago. Installation of
erubis
2.6.5 was straightforeward and worked with no changes to the views. But
speedup was only 4% at best. I did not succeed in getting the
preprocessing
features to work at all (the [%= … %] was not recognized).

Does anyone have some recent experience with Erubis and is the speedup
factor
still similar? Or has its optimizations been encorporated into ERB?

TIA,
Jeffrey