From their website http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.0/faq
" The biggest CPU consumer in the Play stack at this time is the template engine based on Groovy. But as Play applications are easily scalable, it is not really a problem if you need to serve a very high traffic: you can balance the load between several servers. And we hope for a performance gain at this level with the new JDK7 and its better support of dynamic languages. "
So there are no better choices? What about JSP?