How big could a Ruby on Rails site scale interests me.
Take 37signals who have just over 1 million users. Amazing products
but not mass market like myspace or youtube…
If someone released a site that got huge traffic and users, how big
could it go?
5 million users, 10 million, 20 million?
On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 09:08:39PM -0000, [email protected] wrote:
How big could a Ruby on Rails site scale interests me.
Take 37signals who have just over 1 million users. Amazing products
but not mass market like myspace or youtube…
If someone released a site that got huge traffic and users, how big
could it go?
5 million users, 10 million, 20 million?
Keep watching www.revolutionhealth.com since that’s where it’s aiming to
go. Beyond seeing the success or failure of such a huge site, how would
you
know?
–Greg
Most people will ignore this question, but I’ll answer it…
Don’t measure in users, measure in hits. How many hits do you expect to
get
in a day? A user does not just come to your site once… they do a lot
of
things while they are there. Adding AJAX can really raise that number.
Rails, like PHP, Java, .Net, etc can scale just fine. You just need to
know
how.
I’ve seen www.revolutionhealth.com on Techcrunch.
A really nice site.
I didn’t quite understand “Beyond seeing the success or failure of
such a huge site, how would you
know?”
DT.
On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 09:24:57PM -0000, [email protected] wrote:
I’ve seen www.revolutionhealth.com on Techcrunch.
A really nice site.
I didn’t quite understand “Beyond seeing the success or failure of
such a huge site, how would you know?”
We can talk about shared nothing, about scaling up and scaling out,
about
strategies for scaling, about data centers and server farms, but there’s
nothing like an actual, real-world site standing up to load or failing
to
do so to give you an idea of whether some technology can scale. If it
stands up, the technology scaled. If it doesn’t, the people responsible
for
making it scaled didn’t succeed and the reason they failed may or may
not
be something inherent in the technology itself.
Basically, the strategies exist, it can be attempted, and there is
reason
to believe that it can succeed. Beyond that… did eBay or Amazon know
they’d be able to stand up to the load a priori, or did they just put it
out there and optimize when they started having problems? I don’t know,
but
I doubt that Jeff Bezos would have said in 1994 that he was sure he
could
build a site that scaled to what Amazon deals with today.
DT.
–Greg
Install RoR on every internet connected computer in the world, with as
many mogrels as each computer, can handle using all the web servers in
the world connected thought the greatest clustering software in the
world, backed by every supported database running in the world to
store your data.
That’s how far RoR will scale. Now how far can you “afford” to scale?
Being sarcastic to some degree in case you didn’t catch on to
that… Point being “Try it and see. And optimize as you go along.”
On Apr 10, 5:36 pm, Gregory S. [email protected]