Ruby on Rails is Slow According to Twitter
In a recent interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne, he candidly admitted that the the Ruby programming language, and by association the Rails framework, aren't very scalable. A couple of comments really stuck out:
"Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework. The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it."
and:
"It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow."
I'm not a Rails developer myself so I can't agree or disagree but coming from a developer of such a large site as Twitter, these comments really make you wonder why Rails is such a hot framework and why people are flocking to it.
Now, I'm not posting about this to take a cheap shot at the Rails community but I truly question all of the hype that surrounds Ruby on Rails when proven technologies such as ColdFusion and BlueDragon continue to be treated as red-headed step children. Its certainly been proven time and time again that CF-based servers can effectively scale and handle large web applications. But here we have an example of an application framework (Rails) that's the darling of the web development world and yet is having trouble meeting the demands of one of the newest and fastest growing websites on the Net.
So, how does ColdFusion break out of this position? I'd really like to hear from you my readers. I'm looking forward to your ideas and suggestions and I'll be sure to have Adobe CF Product Manager Tim Buntel and New Atlanta President Vince Bonfanti review suggestions so they can better position their respective products.
I would say Ruby is Relatively Slow. Ruby does offer a significant amount of power and dynamicity. These Core and Much Beloved features of the language and the Rails framework contribute to its Relative Slowness.
Fact is, when you make the machine do it, instead of the programmer, there is some expense to pay. These arguments are the same arguments used for and against ColdFusion.
Sure, the Twitter people could have implemented the whole site in Hardware, if they wanted pure On Metal speed. They chose to use technology that got them off the ground much faster than a Hardware/ Assembly/ C/ C++/ etc based platform would have gotten them.
You don't get both sides.
Scalability matters less for open source frameworks since the per CPU cost of deployment is less (hardware only, versus hardware and software).
That's their argument on why slow doesn't matter when starting off at least. There's a lot of things you can do better in Rails they weren't doing which are possible, like caching, or using memcache for their db caching or any of a bunch of things. Problem is when you're growing so fast it's hard to do anything as fast it's growing. Myspace had the same problem which had people cursing CF's speed issues when the real problem was just lazy code and huge growth. Whether Twitter is able to adapt to this growth will be the real question of Rails ability to scale under pressure in my opinion, one that has been verified to be possible in CF by Myspace.
<a href="http://www.dotrb.com/2007/8/11/scaling-rails-with-...;
http://www.dotrb.com/2007/8/11/scaling-rails-with-...
Sorry to double post, i thought i was helping with wrapping the first link in anchor tags... my bad