

This Word, "Scaling" - edw519
http://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/this-word-scaling.html

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apathy
_Your web framework - what you use to fill up your memcache._

This is too classic not to be quoted for tl;dr visitors.

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DaniFong
This is a terrific treatise on the problem of scaling, and the Divmod
strategy, which I recommend to anyone looking for a clear picture in mind. It
will help you make scalable systems where ever you are.

For me, Mantissa was more than an intellectual curiosity. I built my site on
top of it. Though I'm now migrating to App Engine for other, pragmatic reasons
(hosted environment, ease of deployment, Google's CDN, not having to do system
maintenance, integration with Google's auth system, integration with Google
services, BigTable, great prices, PR), Mantissa is a terrific place to get
started to learn about the basics of scalability.

Once Divmod is able to get the rough spots ironed out, Mantissa could be a
major competitor to App Engine. What they could provide in a hosted
environment includes things Google has either ruled not to do, or haven't done
yet (such as COMET).

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ashleyw
Wow I'm sorry, but that was a pretty bad article, it seemed like the author
knew little about the subject?

First of all, it said rails doesn't scale. This is so inaccurate on so many
levels. Mainly because everything scales. Obviously for some situations
languages like C will deal tons better - like google search. And some
languages will be able to support more connections per server (again, C and
even Ruby without the rails framework on top). But at the end of the day -
Ruby on Rails will scale like any other language/framework, just sort out the
database side to shard/slave and your away.

Oh and it compared Ruby on Rails to the Google App Engine. Two totally
different things.

Just doesn't seem like a well thought out article to me?

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gcv
Early on, the author says: "If you write an application with Rails, you
probably have to write a whole bunch of new code, or at least change around
all of your old code, in order to get it to run on multiple computers." This
is absolutely true. Rails "scales" by forcing programmers to do a whole lot of
extra work (yes, sharding and secondary databases and lots of other things)
which isn't particularly natural in the framework.

As a programmer, I'm not particularly thrilled to have to set up and maintain
a memcached cluster and then write code to make sure my object reads pass
through the caching layer. It's more work. It's more fragile. It probably
forced me to revisit and modify working code.

The author wants to build a framework where scalable code is the default and
natural way to write applications. Seems pretty well-thought out. He touches
on many of the common pain points.

