LocalTwitter blaming Ruby on Rails for failures?
April 12, 2007
Twitter has become quite a popular application and as a result the system is fielding more than 11,000 requests per second across some 16 cores. The result? The service feels slow as hell. Turns out the Twitter folks, specifically Alex Payne, is placing the blame squarly on the Ruby on Rails framework. Alex explains in an interview with Josh Kezner,
It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
David Hansson responds by suggesting that the Twitter folks might be a little lazy. In prior conversations with the Twitter team David explains their plan to scale the application, "It sounded like they had a good plan at the time, though. Roll in a rack of new servers, look into doing substantial caching, and move beyond a single database server. The normal road to sanity employed by most any web application experiencing rapid growth." David is concerned that Alex Payne is afraid of hard work, i.e. the hard work of scaling any popular application. Alex explained, "The solutions to this are caching the hell out of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases, neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it’s not just cost, it’s time, and time is that much more precious when people can[’t] reach your site. None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails."
David is obviously taking Twitter’s comments about Rails personally. But instead of simply complaining he explains how problems, such as the one faced by Twitter can present an opportunity for the entire community.
Second, when you work with open source and you discover new requirements not met by the software, it’s your shining opportunity to give something back. Rather than just sit around idle waiting for some vendor to fix your problems, you get the unique chance of being a steward of your own destiny. To become a participant in the community rather than a mere spectator. This is especially true with frameworks like Rails that are implemented in high-level languages like Ruby. The barriers to contribution are exceptionally low.
In this case, it seems that Twitter requires more sophisticated ways of talking to many databases at the same time. Alex puts it a little black and white with "…there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time", which isn’t really true, but it could definitely be done better. Last I spoke with Twitter, we discussed this and they sounded enthusiastic about being able to further this area of Rails. It’s disappointing to hear that they’ve forsaken that opportunity for an arms-crossed alternative.
In any case, I’m proud that Twitter is having to push the envelope on scaling Rails. Fielding 11,000+ requests per second is no small feat for any dynamic web application. Once the stress of having to deal with that in the moment subsides, I’m convinced that the team will grow beyond the blame game, get their hands dirty as full participants in an open source community, and contribute back their advances to the framework. We’ll all be richer for it.
Comments
6 Responses to “Twitter blaming Ruby on Rails for failures?”
Got something to say?
Search
-
Recent Posts
- Dallas' Mark Cuban to join Yahoo's Board!
- Icahn to Oust Yahoo's Entire Board!
- Social Intelligence Meet-Up?
- I Herrd it on the Caribbean Startup Blog!
- Web 2.0: why I don't blog about it much anymore. . .
- Microsoft's Startup Team
- Herrd.com the Caribbean’s answer to Digg.com
- Icahn to do Microsoft's Dirty Work?
- Startups that out live you . . .
- Wanted: Social Intelligence Dashboard
Advertisement
[...] You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Prev/Next Posts « O’Reilly responds to code of conductfeedback | Home Leave a Reply [...]
There are many who are very passionate about Ruby on Rails - but it may not be the right platform for scaleability. I am curious what the highest traffic using RoR is…
Ruby is slower than it should be. Rails is more limited in some ways than you’d really like. It’s possible to work around these fact by putting extra effort into creative deployment. All of the above statements are true, and it’s not playing “the blame game” to acknowledge that Ruby and Rails aren’t the most mature language/platform pair around and an awful lot of work needs to be done, especially in making Ruby into a “real” language. (Where “real” is “state of the art in language implementation for the year 2007″, which Ruby very definitely isn’t.)
To be fair to Ruby on Rails, the article title says “Twitter blaming Ruby on Rails for failures?”, yet the quote from Alex is talking about the speed of ‘Ruby’ - the underlying interpreted language. I make the distinction because if you had a faster Ruby (via various methods now in development), you would not necessarily make any changes to the ROR framework that is running on top of it. Note that Alex didn’t say that it was the ROR framework that is slowing them down.
Alex Payne is freaking clueless about scalability, he has all the experience of a new college graduate who wouldn’t know scalability if it bit him in the ass. Saying that all the scalability problem lies with Ruby on Rails is like a blind man holding onto an elephant’s tail and saying that an elephant is a thin wiry spineless animal.
[...] of his site with Ruby on Rails and gone back to PHP scripting. And earlier in the year Twitter blamed Ruby on Rails for degraded performance on its [...]