Lonely Lion

Chris McAvoy likes kites

Twitter on Rails

with 3 comments

So, if you have any negative comments about Rails, you instantly get attacked online, right? True, unless you’re a developer for Twitter. Look, I love Rails, I really do, it’s a great framework, it’s fun to use, it’s inspired lots of good improvements in the world of web building, and it’s tremendously useful. (This is me, trying not to get jumped in an alley.)

Anyway, it’s just pretty fun to imagine a super hard core Rails zealot gearing up to comment-slam this frank assessment of Rails, and realizing he can’t, because Twitter is the current internet darling of the Web 2.0 crowd. It’s a gorgeous picture.

As an aside…could the single biggest bottleneck in the article (the database) be improved by clustering? I have to believe they’re already clustered, so I’m guessing he’d like to shard the database (which is a new concept for me). Anyone care to comment on the performance gains of a cluster vs. a bunch of shards?

Written by Chris

April 12th, 2007 at 10:14 am

Posted in Ruby

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  • http://spiritmech.blogspot.com Steve

    I don’t know either, but yeah, I can only imagine they’ve taken advantage of clustering and whatever enterprise services Mysql has to get a handle on that beast.

    I do think it was interesting they mentioned Python. I wonder if Java would be slower or faster. In theory faster, but maybe not.

  • Timothy Dinkins

    I work on a Rails application that uses MySQLs NDB clustering. We do use multiple read and write servers and achieve that with a load balancer in front of the NDB cluster.

    NDB cluster can definitely give you faster read performance, but if you have a lot of writes (which we don’t, compared to reads) you will suffer. Also table joins are more expensive with NDB.

  • Tupleman

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