

Evan Williams: Twitter not abandoning Rails - nickb
http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348

======
dhh
Now where's the TC retraction? (oh, forgot, there's no link-bait in boring
stuff like accuracy)

~~~
merrick33
retraction or correction? TC is only partially right/wrong... Ev's says:

"Lots of our code is not in RoR, already, though"

Sounds like an ongoing process rather than a new thing

~~~
dhh
Let me give you a scoop, then: Lots of 37signals code is not in Rails, either.
We run Solr for search. We use a C-based poller for Campfire. We call out to
ImageMagick for transformations of images.

Most successful LAMP sites use software from more than one bucket. That is not
news.

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sanj
There's an important point that is getting missed here.

Twitter uses multiple technologies, not just Rails.

Everyone who hopes that their site grows to a Twitteresque-size should design
a system such that components (db, messaging, processing, frontend) are
decoupled enough that they can be swapped (ideally transparently) if/when they
become the bottleneck.

~~~
nickb
More details on that statement:

"Selvitelle told eWEEK that reports of Twitter abandoning Rails are "Not true
in any sense. We use Ruby as our primary language. We have plenty of back-end
architecture in other languages. Especially prototypes. We still use Rails and
have no plans to discontinue this in the future."

[http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Ruby-
Rails-...](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Ruby-Rails-Give-
Twitter-its-Tweet/)

------
st3fan
Twitter could have been such a nice ActiveMQ/Jetty+Cometd Java application I
think. And probably run on half the amount of hardware that they have now.
Rails is not very efficient when it comes to resources. I have re-implemented
Ruby/Rails code that runs faster and in 3 times less hardware on Java. Closer
to the metal. Better usage of OS services.

------
ericb
It's a 500 error right now. _sigh_

edit: ok, it's back.

~~~
drubio
Yep, got a 500 error to! I thought the post was a joke...reloaded and realized
it wasn't, got a clean page.

If you reload the page 3-5 times in a few seconds, you get the 500 error page.
Now those are serious scaling issues!

~~~
michaelneale
Afraid so. Rails got them to market, if they have to port to whatever, they
should do it and I don't see why that is a big deal for anyone. I still like
rails even if it can't scale to twitter.

------
brooksbp
Recent downtime (the 500 errors) caused by rebooting database servers...

I just did a double-take... rebooting servers... really? really??

<http://blog.twitter.com/>

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copenja
_sigh_

I admit, this is really hard to resist.

But please, can we try?

------
aschobel
Are they already using Java?

This is al3x's comment from last night:

"Apologies, that would be our Apache answering when it can't find an
application server to talk to. We'll work returning a proper 501 in that case.
"

[http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-
talk/brow...](http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-
talk/browse_thread/thread/872e0ee0505b4113)

It's been a few years since I did Rails, but isn't "app server" the parlance
of the Java world?

~~~
cstejerean
Application server is not a Java specific term. In the case of Rails apps
deployed with Mongrel the mongrel instances are the application servers.

------
raghus
Is this the first time a twit has been submitted to news.yc?

~~~
dfranke
Nope. Cringely gets submitted here with some regularity, for example.

~~~
SwellJoe
Say what you will about Cringely, he's had pretty stunning accuracy at
predicting Apple's biggest moves for several years now...even the stuff that
seems unlikely except in hindsight.

~~~
dfranke
Yeah, I just couldn't resist the snark and he was the first soft target that
came to mind :-)

~~~
SwellJoe
And, I don't know if you've heard Joe Kraus speak, but he almost always tells
the story of the serendipity that led to his success with Excite...and the
first step in that series of unlikely events, the kind fellow who spoke to him
was Cringely. He lined up their first customer and first investor and offered
them lots of (bad) advice. But Joe obviously still feels very positive about
it, because he's brought it up three times out of four that I've seen him
speak.

Cringely's telling of the story:

[http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/1999/pulpit_19990121_0005...](http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/1999/pulpit_19990121_000598.html)

------
aneesh
"We lost a database server, which is causing lots of errors. Reloading the
page may work. It's in the process of recovery."

From <http://twitter.com/twitter_status>

~~~
nuggien
Maybe they can use their new funding to go hire some engineers who know what
they are doing.

~~~
menloparkbum
I'll get karma-bombed into oblivion for saying this, but I've found it
disturbing that a programming culture so obsessed with "testing" has so many
problems keeping their servers up and running...

~~~
ericb
Even Hacker News seems to have skipped making load testing part of the
process. Unit testing won't help you with these types of problems, but load
testing is a pain and big companies skip it too sometimes, usually to their
detriment.

------
merrick33
OR twitter abandoned rails long ago... nothing to see here

------
mooders
Still 500.

And to think, I nearly based my company on Rails... Not a great advert for
what appears on the face of it to be such a promising Framework.

~~~
aantix
They're having problems with their database servers. It has nothing to do with
Rails.

~~~
ssharp
I love the mentality here. Thrash TC for posting something they "know nothing
about" yet turn the attention onto something else that you probably don't know
anything about. Unless you guys have access to Twitters racks, let's save some
of the defense/speculation. I'd guess Arrington and Co. probably have
significantly better sources than anyone on here.

~~~
jon_dahl
They announced that it was a DB problem yesterday.

<http://twitter.com/twitter_status>

~~~
ssharp
If they said it, it must be true!

