# Guidelines to developing with scaling in mind

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/guidelines-to-developing-with-scaling-in-mind/128586>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [February 9, 2008, 1:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/guidelines-to-developing-with-scaling-in-mind/128586 "2008-02-09T01:02:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [February 9, 2008, 1:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/guidelines-to-developing-with-scaling-in-mind/128586/1 "2008-02-09T01:02:02Z")

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I’ve been reading a lot about how many larger sites are failing due to  
the scaling issues RoR has out of the box. I was looking at the well  
known Twitter problems, even that somewhat comical slideshow they put  
up.

Perhaps with all the tips that are hinted out there, maybe there’s a  
way to develop RoR from the beginning with scaling issues in mind,  
such that at production time when you’re surprisingly successful (we  
can all dream right?) you wont’ be faced with so many scaling  
pitfalls.

Are there any articles / books / tutorials on scaling best practices  
for RoR?

I want to continue development on RoR but I’m afraid to with the  
scaling issues. We may move over to a PHP based framework like  
Symfony or look into the RoR port to PHP Akelos.

Please let me know if it is a smart thing to stick to RoR despite  
scaling issues. I know they can be worked out, but not sure if that  
can justify it.

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**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [February 9, 2008, 1:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/guidelines-to-developing-with-scaling-in-mind/128586/2 "2008-02-09T01:23:43Z")

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On 9 Feb 2008, at 00:01, -kinetic wrote:

> pitfalls.

I was at the session on scaling by the twitter people at railsconf  
europe last year, and they basically said ‘don’t do that’ (or in other  
words, don’t optimise prematurely ).

Fred

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**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [February 9, 2008, 4:39am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/guidelines-to-developing-with-scaling-in-mind/128586/3 "2008-02-09T04:39:36Z")

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> Are there any articles / books / tutorials on scaling best practices  
> for RoR?

No. But there are resources out there to on scaling best practices.

If you are going to get as enough traffic that you need to scale you’ll  
need to scale regardless of the underlying platform.

It’s not a Rails issue. Rails scales just fine as long as you know and  
understand the rest of it. Rails is a very very small piece of that  
puzzle.

That said, if you think you’re going to be scaling think now about every  
single piece of your application being on a separate server – or  
multiple  
servers. That will make you think about things like cookies, how to  
handle uploaded resources (such as avatars say), etc.

But none of that is a Rails issue. You’d have to figure the same thing  
out for every other framework out there.

For the record, I worked on a Rails site where we didn’t do a lot of  
page  
caching (we cached db calls quite a bit though) and did over 8 million  
_pages_ a day (not hits. pages. actual rails requests). That’s not the  
biggest, but if you need a number that is plenty big enough to dispell  
the  
myth that Rails has scaling problems.

-philip

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [February 15, 2008, 1:14am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/guidelines-to-developing-with-scaling-in-mind/128586/4 "2008-02-15T01:14:39Z")

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Take a look at:

[http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2007/7/29/scale-rails-from-one-box-to-three-four-and-five](http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2007/7/29/scale-rails-from-one-box-to-three-four-and-five)

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**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2008, 7:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/guidelines-to-developing-with-scaling-in-mind/128586/5 "2008-02-14T19:48:03Z")

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Since the scaling question seems to keep coming up, I put together an  
article that summarizes what I’ve been able to collect. I’d appreciate  
any feedback on it.

[http://www.buildingwebapps.com/articles/13-can-rails-scale-absolutely](http://www.buildingwebapps.com/articles/13-can-rails-scale-absolutely)

Michael S.  
[www.BuildingWebApps.com](http://www.BuildingWebApps.com)

P.S. Philip, can you identify the site that was doing 8 million pages  
a day? I haven’t been able to document any Rails sites with that much  
traffic. The biggest I’ve found is [yellowpages.com](http://yellowpages.com), which  
extrapolating from the [compete.com](http://compete.com) figures, does something in the  
vicinity of 3-5 million pages a day.