I just looked at the Alioth benchmarks and found that Lua (not JIT) is around three times faster than Python 3. I remember the differences being larger with Python 2.x, but I'm not going to take the time to look for those benchmarks. On one benchmark, Lua was much slower.

I barely know Python, though I've found it fairly easy to pick up and use when I've needed to. I know Ruby pretty well though, and I find Lua about as easy to use as Ruby.