+1 for what Mark said. Also, a lot of this 'does Rails scale' crap stems from people conflating performance and scalability. They think that because Rails is slow(er), it can't scale but that's a load of crap. Scalability and performance orthogonal to each other.
For instance, a Java web app would be faster than the Ruby equivalent (all other things being equal, such as same database & schema, etc) and thus it's performance would be higher. But both would scale just as well: total cluster performance would be proportional to the size of your cluster, until you hit some other bottleneck (such as the database or network capacity). This is just inherent in HTTP's stateless nature: it scales out well because the requests are independent of each other. (Bonus points for recognising that there's a sweet spot where the infrastructure savings from using something with more performance, outweigh the cheaper development costs of using something as snazzy as Rails. But for 99% of apps we won't need to worry about that because they'll never get that big) On 20 August 2010 11:13, Mark Wotton <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Joshua Partogi <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> I often hear people say that rails is not scalable. What does it mean >> by that exactly? >> >> Does it mean that: >> 1. Rails can not be clustered? >> 2. Rails can not handle many concurrent users? >> 3. The code gets messy when the apps gets larger? >> 4. The performance is not fast? >> >> I am still confused by these buzzword that I often hear in many >> forums. So what are they actually referring when they say rails is not >> scalable? > > There are a few application domains where Rails isn't really > appropriate, like chat servers where clients hold connections open > over a long time. If you look at those systems, obviously something > like Node.js is going to have a large advantage. > > and yes, Ruby is pretty slow as interpreters go, but if you're > building a website that's going to get high load and you're not > already thinking about caching, you're pretty much screwed anyway. In > that use case, Rails is just a convenient way of populating the cache. > > mark > > > -- > A UNIX signature isn't a return address, it's the ASCII equivalent of a > black velvet clown painting. It's a rectangle of carets surrounding a > quote from a literary giant of weeniedom like Heinlein or Dr. Who. > -- Chris Maeda > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en. > > -- James -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en.
