Although even with "Web 2.0" sites, I have yet to see a Rails application (or any ol' Ruby app for that matter) that scales. Everything I have seen until now just doesn't cut it, which is shame.
Some none-core parts of our application, a social network, are being written in Rails and IMHO they can be grateful that they don't get the total hit from the users, because then it would just explode.
If you have to get down to fine-tuning the queries to even minimize index scans, pretty much all the saved effort in the application development vanishes, and you're writing a lot of code to just keep it being fast enough.
Sure, Rails makes a lot of stuff easy, you're very quick to have something working, but if you're talking about writing big web applications, you either already have some sort of framework, or you will be writing one that exactly suits your need.
And, Ruby ain't exactly fast, which AFAIK stems from the fact that it isn't bytecode compiled yet. That's a major bummer, and I'm not sure when that'll be changed. Until then, I know that I won't consider it for anything that must scale up to thousands of concurrent users, saved development time or not.
If it doesn't scale, then it's out for big installations, but I'm all ears for someone with different experiences.
by Kay Roepke — Feb 06
Although even with "Web 2.0" sites, I have yet to see a Rails application (or any ol' Ruby app for that matter) that scales. Everything I have seen until now just doesn't cut it, which is shame.
Some none-core parts of our application, a social network, are being written in Rails and IMHO they can be grateful that they don't get the total hit from the users, because then it would just explode.
If you have to get down to fine-tuning the queries to even minimize index scans, pretty much all the saved effort in the application development vanishes, and you're writing a lot of code to just keep it being fast enough.
Sure, Rails makes a lot of stuff easy, you're very quick to have something working, but if you're talking about writing big web applications, you either already have some sort of framework, or you will be writing one that exactly suits your need.
And, Ruby ain't exactly fast, which AFAIK stems from the fact that it isn't bytecode compiled yet. That's a major bummer, and I'm not sure when that'll be changed. Until then, I know that I won't consider it for anything that must scale up to thousands of concurrent users, saved development time or not.
If it doesn't scale, then it's out for big installations, but I'm all ears for someone with different experiences.