zlacker

>>evanwe+(OP)
This isn't shocking - Twitter was notorious for being held together with Scotch tape technically.

Honestly this hands-on approach is an impressive example of doing things that don't scale.

>>gringo+Hw
I found it amusing that Twitter was Rails' biggest advertisement. Everyone wanted to use Rails but Twitter turned into a franken app with different stacks to keep it running

>>gianca+1x
From 2008:

Scaling is fundamentally about the ability of a system to easily support many servers. So something is scalable if you can easily start with one server and go easily to 100, 1000, or 10,000 servers and get performance improvement commensurate with the increase in resources.

When people talk about languages scaling, this is silly, because it is really the architecture that determines the scalability. One language may be slower than another, but this will not affect the ability of the system to add more servers.

Typically one language could be two or three, or even ten times slower. But all this would mean in a highly scalable system is that you would need two or three or ten times the number of servers to handle a given load. Servers aren't free (just ask Facebook), but a well-capitalized company can certainly afford them.

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/5/why-can-t-twitter-scal...

>>scarfa+0L
Yes, well, that's a nice idea in theory. In practice, you could get over 10x (sometimes 100x) the rps off a box running the new, JVM-based services vs their Rails-equivalents. Orders of magnitude probably matter a little less when you're well-funded and have hundreds of servers, but when you are thinking about trying to go public and your bottom line is being scrutinized and you have 10's of thousands of servers, it starts to matter.

>>sulam+VO
10x, Sure, possible. 100x?

Most of the problem lies in Database. Rails may not be best architecture for scale. But I doubt you could even get 100x difference if the bottleneck is in Database.

I don't know any large, JVM based WebSite in large scale on top of my head, but I consider Stackoverflow, written in ASP.NET to be one of the best and most optimised site. Near 700M Pageview per month, with 10 Front End Servers. At peak it does close to 5000 RPS, Cookpad does 15,000 RPS with 300 Rails Server. But the SO servers are at least twice as powerful, so that scale is like 500 RPS / Server to 100RPS / Server. 5x Difference.

>>ksec+T21
You're making the assumption that there is a database in the mix for the 100X case. There wasn't, except in-memory. It wasn't a 100X improvement across the board, it was 10X to 100X.