Comments on: Is Twitter Responsible For Rails’ Image?

By: G B Hoyt

G B Hoyt — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:55:04 +0000

I think the most impotant factor to consider in any new technology is not scalibility. That's asking a question for a time when servers had had set physical limits. As virtualiation becomes more mainstream, the old ruby maxim “computers are getting faster, people aren't” becomes a bigger factor in application development than scalibility. To keep things on track, a better question to ask in regard to twitter being a rails app is “Does rails allow twitter to develop something different and innovative?”

By: Thom Parkin

Thom Parkin — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:24:46 +0000

Well stated, Robert.
This argument is almost like (borrowing a very old and over-used analogy) judging a book by the method used to print it.

By: Senthil Nayagam

Senthil Nayagam — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:13:03 +0000

for good or bad, twitter brought the attention to performance,

some of the decisions made while designing rails was taking into account deficiency in MRI Ruby(the only ruby distribution then), threading , GC, memory usage etc.

now we have more ruby runtime options than we ever had

we have covered a lot of distance from since the early days, FCGI, SCGI, mongrel and now mongrel enhanced ones(evented mongrel, swiftply) and passenger

we now have chance to undo all those non-enterprisy image issues we had. I am personally working on reviving actionwebservice and completing the unfinished agendas

By: Robert Dempsey weighs in on the F5 Ruby Scale thing « CodeHappy

Robert Dempsey weighs in on the F5 Ruby Scale thing « CodeHappy — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:20:13 +0000

[...] Robert’s latest blog post asks if Twitter damaged Rails reputation with all it’s downtime etc. He comes to the conclusion that it probably didn’t, but he also says that, as so many have, the Ruby scaling problem is a moot one. “ZDNet had a great article on LinkedIn using Rails for a Facebook app that serves 1B pageviews/month, which is on the first page of Ã¢â‚¬Å“ruby on railsÃ¢â‚¬Â search results, along with a number of articles saying that Rails can scale and to not use Twitter as the benchmark.” [...]

By: Robert Dempsey

Robert Dempsey — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:19:26 +0000

Thanks Joe – I have updated the title.

By: Joe Grossberg

Joe Grossberg — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:26:46 +0000

“Are there any good non CRUD apps written in ror that do scale?”

Yes. YellowPages.com Justin.tv Hulu.com Scribd.com

Only CRUD sites by a very liberal definition, and more traffic than Twitter.com according to http://rails100.pbwiki.com/Alexa+Rankings

Also, Robert, you have a typo in your header: it should be “… for Rails’ Image …” — i.e. with the apostrophe after the “s”.

By: abenamer

abenamer — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:29:54 +0000

I think everyone would like to have Twitter’s problem. Where do I sign up?

By: Web 2.0 Announcer

Web 2.0 Announcer — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:15:37 +0000

Is Twitter Responsible For RailÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Image?…

[...]Is Twitter Responsible For RailÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Image? Personally, I think not, however letÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s take a look at the subject.[...]…

By: Tristan

Tristan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:37:38 +0000

Yes, the archirtecture for twitter isn’t appropriate, it was designed as a blog platform, but it’s really a messaging problem, not a CRUD blog.

RoR is GREAT at making CRUD blogs, havent seen anything else done that was worth using. I am starting to suspect the reason that 37signals doesn’t do new features is because anything that isnt CRUD in RoR doesnt work.

Twitter is proof of my suspicion.

Are there any good non CRUD apps written in ror that do scale?

By: Adam Fortuna

Adam Fortuna — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:23:18 +0000

Anything that can be used as an association with failure usually will be by those trying to make arguments against it. Any hugely popular site that experiences downtime reflects badly on their language choice; whether justified or not. Take MySpace for example. It was running ColdFusion when it was in the top 10 trafficked sites on the web; but due to the downtime CF was marked as the reason (above all others). Seems like an argument that will just keep repeating itself with new languages.

I don’t know what the non-IT world thinks of these kinds of issues in scaling, but anyone in IT worth their salt should know there’s more to it than purely language and framework choice.