RAILS not SCALABLE?

Rails
1

Heyyy

First off, I love rails. Even thuogh I’m not as good as some of you
guys here, but hey, I started couple months ago, and I am still on my
way learning more.

But… I know there are downsides to Rails too. One of them is
scalability. What on earth does that mean?

2

On Apr 21, 11:59 pm, David Z. [email protected] wrote:

Heyyy

First off, I love rails. Even thuogh I’m not as good as some of you
guys here, but hey, I started couple months ago, and I am still on my
way learning more.

But… I know there are downsides to Rails too. One of them is
scalability. What on earth does that mean?

Not an awful lot to be quite honest. That’s not to say that building
an extremely high volume website in rails wouldn’t present
difficulties, but that’s because it’s a difficult task in general.

Fred

3

Not an awful lot to be quite honest. That’s not to say that building
an extremely high volume website in rails wouldn’t present
difficulties, but that’s because it’s a difficult task in general.

Sorry, not an awful lot of what? Problems? Or scalablity?

4

On Apr 22, 12:24 am, David Z. [email protected] wrote:

Not an awful lot to be quite honest. That’s not to say that building
an extremely high volume website in rails wouldn’t present
difficulties, but that’s because it’s a difficult task in general.

Sorry, not an awful lot of what? Problems? Or scalablity?

“What on earth does that mean?” => not an awful lot.
Also, does X scale has been discussed to death for most values of X.

Fred

5

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:59 PM, David Z. [email protected]
wrote:

Heyyy

First off, I love rails. Even thuogh I’m not as good as some of you
guys here, but hey, I started couple months ago, and I am still on my
way learning more.

But… I know there are downsides to Rails too. One of them is
scalability. What on earth does that mean?

Wow.

If you don’t know what scalability even is then you definitely don’t
know if Rails has a problem with it.

6

David Z. wrote:

Heyyy

First off, I love rails. Even thuogh I’m not as good as some of you
guys here, but hey, I started couple months ago, and I am still on my
way learning more.

But… I know there are downsides to Rails too. One of them is
scalability. What on earth does that mean?

You don’t have a scaling problem!

If you ever do have a scaling problem you won’t have to ask what it
means. Most of us here would love to have scaling problems, or rather
the need to be concerned about it.

A scaling problem means that people are actually using your application.
Unless you have a completely boneheaded business plan, then it also
means you’re making more than enough profit to acquire whatever you need
to solve said scaling problem.

Although, some reasonable level of planning along way would be prudent.

7

On 21 April 2010 23:59, David Z. [email protected] wrote:

But… I know there are downsides to Rails too. One of them is
scalability. What on earth does that mean?

You don’t know that a downside of Rails is its scalability if you
don’t know what scalability means. You may well have heard or read
it said somewhere, and clarification would certainly help you
understand whether any issue around scalability is likely to be of any
specific concern to you.

My guess is that it’s not going to be something you need to worry
about too much for the moment.

8

I havent had the luxury of having scaling issues myself yet, but I if
an application has trouble handling high volumes of traffic, then the
framework is only one of several possible causes for these issues. A
more likely cause for the issues are the programmers and not the
framework. If you are interested in information on how to scale rails,
then Greg Pollack has made an excelent screencast series called
“Scaling Rails”:
http://railslab.newrelic.com/scaling-rails

9

Scaling problems is what happens when you all of the sudden need to
figure out where to put your 5.000 servers all running 2xQuad core
cpus and have 128 GB memory.

Facebook has 50.000 cache servers, thats ONLY for cache.

If your site can run on a handful of servers, you don’t really have a
scaling problem.

Trausti

10

On Apr 21, 4:59 pm, David Z. [email protected] wrote:

Heyyy

First off, I love rails. Even thuogh I’m not as good as some of you
guys here, but hey, I started couple months ago, and I am still on my
way learning more.

But… I know there are downsides to Rails too. One of them is
scalability. What on earth does that mean?

–

I would highly recommend this PDF on scaling rails. The cover alone is
worth the viewing, and the content of the PDF is unequaled.
http://jasonseifer.com/assets/learningtoscaleror.pdf