Pondering Ruby on Rails Scalability
Posted by: Bob Ngu on: January 26, 2008
It has been a while since I blogged. My site, JiggyMe has been chugging along and has picked up as much traffic as 50,000 hits a month, 3000+ hits a day. I am hosting my site on Slicehost 256MB, 10GB VPS and it has held up rather well so far. However, I keep hearing how Ruby on Rails can’t scale, courtesy of the constant downtime at Twitter.
I know that Rails 2.0 has recently been released but unfortunately I haven’t been paying much attention to it. I wouldn’t mind offering my site up for scalability experiments. Rails is fairly young and I believe that as more sites encounter scalability issues that Rails will be extended to address those issues. Scalability is a complex domain and there is no one correct solution. If the limitation of Rails not being able to connect to multiple databases is the scalability problem, then I believe it is a solvable problem.
How about it, Rails developers, shall we prove the naysayers wrong? Afterall, scripting languages were never designed to scale and yet they (Perl, Python, PHP) are scaling now, it goes to prove that it is just a matter of time to work out the scalability issues.
2 Responses to "Pondering Ruby on Rails Scalability"
February 21, 2008 at 3:38 pm
alphadog, agreed and I know that my site’s traffic is low compared to Twitter, hence it hasn’t hit scalability issues. Despite the common misconception though, I don’t believe Twitter’s scalability issue is with Ruby or Rails. It is what Assetbar said as well,
http://assetbar.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/twitter-proxy-any-interest/.
February 21, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Don’t to drag you down, but scalability is mainly an issue of concurrency and handling of resources. A site with 3000 hits/day is about 2 hits per minute which is low. Your site is perhaps not being tested for concurrency problems with the activity levels you have…unless you have “peaky” activity. Hits on Twitter are probably at a much higher rate…