The Verdict's In: Ruby on Rails is Not Scalable. For Twitter, Anyway

Any hardcore Twitter user will tell you that for all its merits, Twitter's got reliability issues -- especially during periods of high demand, which isn't conducive to growth.

And apparently it's all Ruby's fault.

Following the departure of Blaine Cook and Lee Mighdoll, word has it Twitter will be abandoning Ruby on Rails.

TechCrunch says it'll be starting afresh with either PHP or Java.

When I attended the Ruby Conference last year, this was the big enthusiastic takeaway: "RoR is great for development!" But the lingering question was, "Is it scalable?"

Nobody had been on Rails long enough to know. Pro-Rails devs could only surmise. Most, including Blaine Cook, argued yes.

Michael Arrington writes:

Rails has always bred controversy. Developers have argued that it is fundamentally flawed and unscalable; others have argued back saying the opposite. Earlier this year, one of the core community members and creator of the popular Rails web server Mongrel abandoned rails and trashed the community.

I don't really know if the underlying architecture is Twitter's core problem or if there are other, more philosophical issues brewing back there. For the company, the immediate goal is to create a reasonable degree of stability for users. (Maybe then it can try making money.)

That won't necessarily be easy, considering Twitter's userbase is uniquely sensitive to site hiccups of seconds or minutes.

The good thing about switching to something like PHP is developers have more experience scaling it. So provided Twitter can transplant -- or slowly replace? -- two years' worth of infrastructure without a hitch, its long-term outlook looks less murky.

From a creative perspective, the departure is disappointing. In a way, Twitter is Ruby on Rails' first mainstream success. It's the true test of whether RoR is a legitimate architecture for enterprises, and not just geeks with discretionary time.

Still, the conservatism behind the approach makes sense. I like RoR and all, but if you're a company on a growth spurt whose top architect just exited stage left, this is a bad time to be playing Mad Scientist on a framework nobody really gets.

Hero

I could have used him this weekend. O_O

Anyway, Ruby Conference photos here. They don't convey much beyond my inability to hold a camera still, but at least now you have proof that my ass was indeed warming a seat at the Tech Museum, not in Dubuque, Iowa doing God-knows-what.

Though it's safe to say I felt like Alice might if she wandered into the looking-glass and found herself in East LA.

At 2:00 AM.

Wrote furiously most of Saturday and Sunday. Computer kept freezing. It was bad enough I had a 7-lb. PC, but did it have to get all anxiety-disorder on me too? I never thought I'd experience such acute Mac envy but the world changes when you're surrounded by the haxor elite.

Check out conference coverage at CMSWire. That's not everything; the editor and I are still parsing out a lot of my inflamed hoo-ha. While I had a winning time I was deliriously happy about sliding into my own bed on Sunday and falling asleep to South Park, even if it was the Super Adventurer child molestation episode.

I see the code, I see the code, I see the code.

Post 4/20 Chronic Bust, Geek-Style

I'm in San Jose for the Ruby Conference taking place at the Tech Museum. I've never felt so profoundly out of my element. It's an orgy of haxordom, a veritable Anandtech forum blown-up and come to waking life.

One discussion of interest took place when the founder of Chronic showcased his Ruby-based date and time parser. It's fairly new, and dude admitted the product was mildly buggy, but a burn war of /b/ proportions erupted and I felt the urge to duck.

What Chronic does is interpret natural language and parse out the date. So if you put in "This Tuesday 5pm," it'll spit out "4/24/2007 at 17:00" or some such. Potentially useful for reservation-setting, event creation on calendars, that kind of jazz. Google Calendar does something similar for its Quick Add function.

"Can Chronic interpret 'Five o'clock last New Years Eve'?" someone asked.

"No," the founder admitted, and it was on.

Things got worse at live demo time. It would have been too tame to expect a bunch of devs to politely ask him to input "Noon Friday next week" or "Today's date and time." Requests like "Fourscore and seven years ago!" and "Next month of Sundays!" came flying forth, and one guy actually demanded that the parser reflect 12 noon as 00:00 because that's what it's supposed to be, and everyone misuses it.

Dude decided to nix the questions with the exception of one last from a row of young cavalier coding elites: "Can I have a pony?"

"If you're good," our fine speaker replied, not missing a beat. "One day..."

At the conclusion of the presentation he smilingly suggested his audience turn in a patch or two, then stepped down.

Wild. This place is like church camp, except God has been replaced with code, and praise songs have been replaced with hax heckling.

Heading off to dinner with a guy whose team allegedly built the first Ruby-based CMS. This should be promising.