Twitter: Where Ruby on Rails Goes Off the Track

An article posted on eWeek today was written in an alternate universe where Twitter works:

As the maker of one of the largest applications using Ruby on Rails on the Web, Twitter knows a thing or two about scaling applications built with the popular development framework.

Britt Selvitelle, a senior engineer at Twitter, offered a few tips and tricks for scaling Ruby on Rails and expressed particular appreciation for the Rails framework itself and the language is it based on, Ruby.

"For us, for a large part of our system, Ruby has been the tool that fit," Selvitelle said.

The subhead of the article: "Twitter's reliance on Ruby and Ruby on Rails proves the language's resilience."

Twitter's a nice service, but it's one of the most crash-prone sites I've ever visited. The fact it was written in Ruby on Rails makes me wonder whether the Rails framework can scale, at least once you reach the big leagues and have several hundred thousand users hammering on your web application. On the same day as the eWeek article, TechCrunch floated a rumor that Twitter is dumping Ruby on Rails.

-- via Meme13

Syndicated 2008-05-01 23:54:19 from Workbench