On: How Ravelry Scales to 10 Million Requests Using Rails

[mechanical_fish]

How much development time can you afford to spend to save the cost of four or five servers?

(You can't save the sixth server if you want your site to be up while the seventh one is rebooting or being replaced.)

If the other comments are to be believed, this site was built by one person, working part-time, in four months. He can't afford to lavish time on unimportant problems, like desperately trying to conserve server resources that he could otherwise afford and that cost far less than a programmer's time is worth.

[warfangle → mechanical_fish]

It was originally built by one guy in 4 months part time, but now (according to the article) there's a "small team."

Of course, you're also totally throwing away the "new agile" platforms, like django, scala lift, and so forth.

[sstrudeau → warfangle]

The "small team" is his wife and some community managers -- no other engineers or admins. He builds & runs the whole stack himself, and he has duties outside of the admin/development pieces of the business. So he's still essentially a part time developer/part time admin.