No. As someone who runs a site w/ more than half a million hits a day at times, rails is butt slow. We memcache up the wazoo as well as make other optimizations.
Not only is it slow but there are memory leaks too.
I hope they fix alot of this. We went w/ rails b/c of the elegance, but paid for being on the bleeding edge.
i.e. continue what you've been doing, rewrite in another language, or what?
Not that this is your scenario, but whenever I'm in a crunch situation, it always feels like the grass is always greener. When you get to the other side... well, you know how it goes.
Unfortunately I can't b/c of some reasons I'd be happy to share later. I know it sounds like a copout, but really, I'd be in trouble if I mentioned it now.
Upper mgmt is making us rewrite it in java. (shoot self). It has more to do with what they are comfortable with long term and what the company runs and has the know-how to support.
If I had to do it over again, I'd look at Python more carefully. Django was barely out when we started so we were a bit leery of it. In addition, I didn't have a great impression of Python from doing some toy programs in it. I really liked Ruby's elegance.
Overall, I don't think we would've chosen Java above what we have, warts and all. Java is too verbose and RoR let us be extremely flexible and fast when it mattered.
Outside of upper management intervention, we'd probably have continued down the ruby path and gambled on the fact that things would be fixed/better in a few years.
I feel for twitter, but they're really doing a service for the rest of the RoR community by being the pioneer for extreme scaling issues.
Not only is it slow but there are memory leaks too.
I hope they fix alot of this. We went w/ rails b/c of the elegance, but paid for being on the bleeding edge.