I've come across this argument many times. I use Rails in my job. We build applications for small teams. The framework lets us complete applications much more quickly than other alternatives — trust me, we've tried.
Weather or not Rails scales is actually irrelevant to us. The savings in time and development cost is much greater than the cost of additional hardware — which incidentally we don't need at the moment.
All this seems to come from some fetish with 'teh enterprise'. Somehow Rails isn't legitimate because it doesn't scale. Never mind the many healthy businesses built around it.
Overall I think Wincent is being a bit cheeky.
"Now this, 4,000 requests per second. Of course if you throw enough money at the problem Rails will "scale". But didn't we already know that?"
That's heavy traffic! Any framework is going to need additional hardware to deal with it. It's not as if replacing Rails with some other framework will immediately obviate the need for all that hardware.
Yes, some other framework may reach greater heights of efficiency on the same hardware, but really is that even relevant? What does greater efficiency mean if it costs you more to build and maintain your app, but hell, at least your hardware costs are lower?
by Mr eel — Feb 06
Weather or not Rails scales is actually irrelevant to us. The savings in time and development cost is much greater than the cost of additional hardware — which incidentally we don't need at the moment.
All this seems to come from some fetish with 'teh enterprise'. Somehow Rails isn't legitimate because it doesn't scale. Never mind the many healthy businesses built around it.
Overall I think Wincent is being a bit cheeky.
"Now this, 4,000 requests per second. Of course if you throw enough money at the problem Rails will "scale". But didn't we already know that?"
That's heavy traffic! Any framework is going to need additional hardware to deal with it. It's not as if replacing Rails with some other framework will immediately obviate the need for all that hardware.
Yes, some other framework may reach greater heights of efficiency on the same hardware, but really is that even relevant? What does greater efficiency mean if it costs you more to build and maintain your app, but hell, at least your hardware costs are lower?