Performance and scalability

Rails
1

Hi,

My question is.

What are your performance experiences compared to languages such as PHP,
PERL and ASP?

Could you build a site as big as Ebay on rails and have it perform fast
enough?

I’m afraid that the generalisation in components I see so much users
asking for will make the framework too heavy compared to a clean
programmed for perfomance PHP application. Probably even written if in
Ruby itself.

Thanks,

Edward

2

Could you build a site as big as Ebay on rails and have it perform fast
enough?

You could build any size site with any platform. The only question is
what would it cost.

I believe Rails is an immensely scalable platform by virtue of Shared
Nothing. And since Shared Nothing is an approach to scaling used by
most of the LAMP stacks, you don’t need to look at Rails-specific
sites for scalability advice.

Look at LiveJournal, Yahoo, or any of the other big honking sites that
runs the LAMP stack with Shared Nothing approaches. If they scale,
Rails scales.

For further proof, see http://rubyonrails.org/applications. Lots of
these applications are handling more than a million (if not millions)
page request daily now.

David Heinemeier H.
http://www.loudthinking.com – Broadcasting Brain
http://www.basecamphq.com – Online project management
http://www.backpackit.com – Personal information manager
http://www.rubyonrails.com – Web-application framework

3

Could you build a site as big as Ebay on rails and have it perform fast
enough?

This sort of question gets asked all the time: “as big as ebay? as big
as amazon? google?” It betrays a lack of understanding as to just how
big and complicated the architecture of those sites are. Ask anyone
that has actually worked on one of thos sites – scalability of that
magnitude happens with many different sub-systems tied together in
complicated ways.

The LJ powerpoint that describes the evolution of their architecture
is a good starting point to understand how you reach that kind of
massive scaling.

4

On 12/22/05, Tyler K. [email protected] wrote:

Could you provide more info on the powerpoint you referenced? I don’t know what
LJ stands for and a quick search didn’t reveal anything obvious.

LiveJournal

5

Obie F. <obiefernandez@…> writes:

The LJ powerpoint that describes the evolution of their architecture
is a good starting point to understand how you reach that kind of
massive scaling.

Could you provide more info on the powerpoint you referenced? I don’t
know what
LJ stands for and a quick search didn’t reveal anything obvious.

6

On 12/22/05, Obie F. [email protected] wrote:

The LJ powerpoint that describes the evolution of their architecture
is a good starting point to understand how you reach that kind of
massive scaling.

This is the presentation you’re talking about, right Obie?
http://danga.com/words/2004_lisa/

7

On 12/22/05, Wilson B. [email protected] wrote:

The LJ powerpoint that describes the evolution of their architecture
is a good starting point to understand how you reach that kind of
massive scaling.

This is the presentation you’re talking about, right Obie?
http://danga.com/words/2004_lisa/

Replying to myself… you probably meant the newer one…