Rails is an ogre, and ogres have layers

by PapaScott on 16 April 2007

(Disclaimer: My employer is about to deplay its first Rails application, and we admins are somewhat apprehensive about the performance implications.)

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

Lars Strojny 17 April 2007 at 00:31: Which parts of the rails application does not scale?
PapaScott 17 April 2007 at 01:07: @Lars: I have no idea, I linked to the Pilgrim piece purely for its entertainment value. It’s a parody of DHH’s PR skills, which IMHO rank right up there with Matt Mullenweg’s.

Seriously, I think Kellan had the best take on the original interview: Rails scales development time, not performance. That’s the whole idea.

I imagine that selling used cars will not require a Mongrel cluster of twittery proportions, and that in our case Rails will work just fine.
terry chay 22 May 2007 at 00:25: PapaScott. Good point, however I think that’s not quite right either to say we’re at a development time/performance tradeoff.

One the side we are talking (not downloading Wordpress or Wikimedia or SugarCRM to solve our problems, but the build a website from scratch side), Rails is in the 90/10 pareto principle.

Rails does the 90% of your code that takes 10% of your time.

Of course that could be the 80/20 or 70/30 or whatever depending in the problem. At a certain point it’s going to be worth it to use Rails. We all know that.

But what point? A long lived highly scalable web 2.0 application that is in the top 100? I tend to believe that’s somewhere around 99/1 than 70/30.

Thankfully, Twitter is nowhere near the top 100.