

Will your application scale? - bandhunt
http://hacksushi.com/2009/04/05/will-your-application-scale/

======
tomjen
He is partly right, but if you think about what you are doing it shouldn't be
such a big issue to scale reasonably well later on. Rails is properly more
difficult to get to scale since that was never a concern of DDH when he made
it, something like Erlang scales because it was made to do that.

~~~
dasil003
I'm sorry, but this is complete nonsense. Rails is a framework for building
web applications. Erlang is a programming language optimized for distributed
computing.

Rails doesn't have any inherent scalability problems. It uses a share-nothing
architecture which will scale just fine. It's true that Ruby (the _language_
that Rails is written in) is slow and presents some additional challenges to
scaling (green threads, memory leakiness), but ultimately the burden of
scaling rests on the architecture. If Ruby were 100 times faster it would be a
very fast language indeed, but that still wouldn't make scaling easy. 100x is
nothing when you're trying to go from 10 req/s to 1,000,000 req/s.

As to your second part about scaling not being a big issue if you think about
it up front, that is also a load of crap. Yes, don't do stupid things, but
once all the obvious optimizations are gone you will usually be surprised by
where the bottlenecks are. Most applications won't ever get to that size that
scalability becomes seriously difficult, but then they certainly won't have a
problem with Rails either.

------
casta
Also consider that if you write your app with a little bit of "code
responsabiliy", usually when you need to scale, you have so many users that
you can afford to rewrite your code thinking about scaling.

~~~
ryan-allen
Only if you have a business model and you're making money... or VC funding.

I think the more important thing is to hire developers who have 'been there,
done that' so they already know how to write code that is balanced.

~~~
casta
I wrote my little web app without caring about scaling. Now it has about 20000
visitors a day and an average of 8 request per second. The uptime command
says: load average: 0.16, 0.19, 0.15 (on a dual core machine.) Should I have
any problem with the load, I think it would be feasible to find someone
funding me. I understand it depends of the type of the service, but I also
think that most of them could afford to think about scalability when they
actually need it.

------
ruslan
Why every boggling blog writer nowadays says "application" while meaning "web
site" ?

~~~
bandhunt
Because a facebook app and an iphone app aren't websites, yet they still have
many of the same issues. Websites are becoming more and more like desktop
applications and pigeonholing something as a "website" doesn't make sense,
unless you are only talking about websites and it does not apply to any other
web connected application.

------
yesimahuman
I guess we'll find out once I get customers!

