Pair Programming Productivity Pair Programming Productivity … Part 2
Mar 03

It’s 3am…. can your Web framework handle a diggin?

Comic, Politics, Ruby, Tech, Web Frameworks with tags: , Add comments

Rails at 3am

I hate the fear ads, and seeing the Clinton one was sad to see. Showing pictures of kids etc… are you kidding me?

I know Hilary is scrapping for her life, but still. I really don’t understand the experience line too, since she has only been a Senator for a few years. How she comes up with 32 years baffles me.

Anyway, it all reminded me of the fear-monging around Rails scaling.

2 Responses to “It’s 3am…. can your Web framework handle a diggin?”

  1. Eric Burke Says:

    By Hillary logic, my wife (a first grade teacher) is an accomplished programmer simply because she is married to me, a programmer.

  2. Vidar Says:

    Read her Wikipedia entry. She has been involved in assorted commissions and boards etc. since ‘76. I haven’t seen the ads in questions, but if she’s claiming 32 years of public service, it’s not a huge stretch. How much of that you’d consider significant enough to be worth counting is another matter.

    Incidentally I came here because the entry was tagged “ruby” – and combining Rails scaling vs. presidential race is one of the strangest posts yet…

    As for scaling Ruby (I haven’t done much Rails): I’ve deployed production Ruby apps handling millions of queries a month (we did millions of pageviews and each pageview would typically translate into several queries over a persistent connection to our Ruby middleware), and anyone that _don’t_ think Ruby has scaling problems far beyond what PHP and many others do either haven’t deployed Ruby in large environments, or haven’t deployed something like PHP in large environments.

    I dearly love Ruby, and want to use it more, but it took large amounts of pain to learn about all the pitfalls. Don’t even think of combining many threads with IO for example – Ruby will grind to a halt. GC problems and resources leaks quickly become an issue. Things like the MySQL C extensions will easily hang your Ruby processes unless you liberally sprinkle “alarm” calls all over the place. Speed is abysmal.

    There’s a big difference between stating those things and fearmongering ads:

    The Ruby scaling issues are very real, and anyone who’s scaled both a Ruby app and a PHP app will (if they are truthful and not self-deluded at least) tell you there are worlds of difference in the amount of work you need to do and the amount of hardware you need to get the same performance.

    Yes, Ruby apps _can_ be scaled – you can scale anything that’s not fundamentally fucked up – but it requires far more work than people used to other environments would expect, and it negates a lot of the initial advantages of ease of use.

    I don’t use Ruby because it scales easily. I use it _despite_ it’s failings to scale easily, and that should say something about how pleasant Ruby as a language is to work with compared to PHP and others.

    I also have great hope that all of these problems will be fixed (1.9 certainly will help a lot), but I’m not going to stick my head in the sand and pretend there aren’t (a lot of) scaling issues. It doesn’t help Ruby fans, and it certainly doesn’t help us get new converts to Ruby to try to brush very real problems under the carpet.

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