
The Largest Rails Application Loses Ground To PHP Competitor Due to Frequent Outages - staunch
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/17/making-the-switch-from-twitter-to-jaiku/
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vlad
With Friendster, they got progressively more complicated the more users they
got. On the other hand, MySpace was able to grow without any problems because
they had a much simpler setup.

The question to ask is whether a competitor can do something better. I don't
use twitter, but it sounds like any competitor would also have to be doing a
similar number of database queries.

So, any competitor would still have to go through what twitter has, so twitter
is still ahead by now focusing on the scalability.

Twitter has to move people to a non-rails platform as soon as possible. The
whole point of rails or visual basic 6 is to develop a prototype really
quickly and change your ideas to find the one that works. If the problem now
is the speed, just pretend you're a competitor and do what the competitor
would do in your situation. A competitor wouldn't be recreating the failed
versions of Twitter; they would just copy the current idea in C or whatever
the fastest method is, since the business idea and execution is more valuable
now than flexibility, now that the business idea has been discovered and
twitter doesn't have to spend time making so much changes. Except, Visual
Basic 6 programs are very fast on modern computers, and they run on each
user's computer separately, so you wouldn't want to rewrite them for Windows
if it already exists and works.

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staunch
I think this illustrates the huge importance of uptime, even for free
services. On the internet there is (almost) always a choice and people will
pick even a lesser competitor over you, if you can't keep your damn servers
alive.

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eli
Agreed. And it's nothing more than trolling to suggest that this has anything
to do with PHP or Rails (especially based on the evidence given).

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BrandonM
I'm not trying to knock on anyone's development platform of choice, but how
can anyone expect unproven software to perform at the kind of scale that some
of these web apps are being asked to perform at? Lisp is a rather old and
finely tuned language, but in _Ansi Common Lisp_ , Paul Graham even suggests
re-writing frequently-run sections of code in C or assembler. If a highly-
optimized language needs to be profiled and tuned, how can that be avoided
with a language like Python or Ruby?

Of course, there are issues such as SQL queries and system/hardware
configurations that come into effect as well. The point is this: at some
point, when you are trying to grow a product to such a massive scale, you need
to expend some energy on optimization. If you just continue growing things in
the same way you built your initial prototype, you're doomed to failure.

~~~
davidw
There's a difference between optimization and reliability.

For instance, Erlang isn't the fastest thing out there, but you can make some
extremely reliable systems with it.

I still think Rails is a winner because of how fast it lets you develop the
application. Most of us will probably never see the massive popularity spike
that something like twitter has. So, better to optimize for development time,
and put code speed optimization off until it's necessary.

~~~
SwellJoe
True...Optimizing for getting to that popularity level fast is the wise thing
to do, and so the most productive tool to develop in is the best one.

But...there are major costs to a lack of reliability, and they can rear their
head before you reach that level of popularity. If you're not able to stay up
during that all important first crunch or slashdotting or digg...you won't
ever make it to the sustained popularity and growth that requires scaling up.
RoR does seem to have some problems with that.

Ruby is the slowest of the most popular scripting languages, by most measures.
RoR is pathological with databases in some circumstances (not common cases,
admittedly). And, from what I can tell most RoR stacks (Apache+fcgi, Mongrel,
ngenix, Lighty, etc.) have one or more pretty serious flaws when scaling up.

I'd still consider using it, since it's so much damned fun to write Ruby code.

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eli
I don't see any reason to assume that Jaiku will scale better than Twitter a
priori.

I would hope it's running more reliably than Twitter know since it has only a
fraction of the users.

~~~
phil
I think this is a really important point. Here:
[http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=twitter.com&site1;=jaiku.com&site2;=&site3;=&site4;=&y;=r&z;=1&h;=300&w;=610⦥=6m&size;=Medium&url;=twitter.com](http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=twitter.com&site1=jaiku.com&site2=&site3=&site4=&y=r&z=1&h=300&w=610&range=6m&size=Medium&url=twitter.com)
<http://snapshot.compete.com/twitter.com+jaiku.com>

If you believe the public stats, Jaiku is 6x-15x smaller that Twitter.

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staunch
Maybe they should call the Scribd guys, they're doing more traffic than I
thought: <http://snapshot.compete.com/scribd.com+twitter.com>

