On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 3:29 PM, John Napiorkowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I heard Twitter was abandoning RoR. It would be the coup of the year if we > could bring them to Perl, but from what I understand it's not even on the > consideration list. So why not give them a little help? We should have a > hackathon to port Twitter to Catalyst using all our most timesaving and > advanced tech, like Moose, DBIC, etc.
Knock yourselves out, but I remain to be convinced that the scalability of RoR is anything but a red herring. The bottom line is that the design decisions you make at the very beginning of a project tend to be the limiting factor in this area. Sure, your choice of implementation language might not be the fastest, but is it the bottleneck? It strikes me that an awful lot of what makes Twitter 'Twitter' are the heavy-lifting processes that caching and implementation-language choice have very small amounts of influence over. Without fully understanding those, there's the distinct possibility of falling into the same traps. One thing I do know though: As much as OR-mapping systems are lovely and all for the most part, that's the first part I'd ditch if I was all out for screaming performance. Yes, it's possible to code around this by binning and balancing and other techniques, but it's a potentially enormous tradeoff between ease of development vs. sheer unadulterated speed (where all the clever binning, balancing and other techniques still apply). So to conclude: Twitter is a typical prototype that didn't scale. No shame in that. Mitigation can only get you so far, and it's really, REALLY tough to migrate and swap out something as complicated whilst making sweeping changes and still maintaining uptime. None of this is intended as a slight on any of the magnificent work that's been done, it's insanely good, and I'm happy to stick my hand out, wave it around and say 'Thanks!' to everyone's CPAN code I rely on for my day-to-day job. But hubris, however well-intentioned, is still hubris unless you pay particular attention to the lessons learned. This post is not intended to be pooh-poohing or flamebait, I'd personally love to see some kind of scalable twitteresque application to come out of this, it's just that I've yet to see anyone point out the enormity of such a task. :-) Chris _______________________________________________ List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/