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Is Ruby/Rails faster now? I built a few simple sites on Rails 2.3 via Passenger, and my God, it was such a performance hog compared to every other web stack I'd

by ericd 10y ago

Is Ruby/Rails faster now? I built a few simple sites on Rails 2.3 via Passenger, and my God, it was such a performance hog compared to every other web stack I'd ever used. Probably mostly a function of how heavyweight RoR was, but I never got deep enough to figure out what was so slow about it. It may also have been user error, but it seemed like others were bragging about getting it to levels of performance that would be frankly embarrassing on most stacks.

brightball 10y ago
It is. Come a long way since Rails 2. There are still much faster options out there but it's nowhere near the beast that it used to be.
- ericd 10y ago
  Great to hear, I might revisit it in a future project then - the experience was generally really nice, but the performance was really painful.
  - brightball 10y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Elixir advocate largely because you get the performance and scaling perks of other languages with very close to the development perks of Ruby. I just get tired of hearing the "but Ruby is slow" drum beats when it's so consistently successful. Scaling web servers is easy. Scaling the database is hard.
    - ericd 10y ago
      Yeah, I was just asking if it had improved. Scaling web servers might be easy, but it adds administrative overhead, and if you don't have big piles of VC money to burn, it bites into budgets that would be better used hiring more people and working on product. And it makes it so you have to waste your time reworking your server structure earlier than you would have to otherwise - suddenly you need a load balancer, a shared session store, etc. When I ran a company, these were very real concerns. It being successful doesn't excuse its slowness, in my opinion. There are lots of bad products out there that are successful by many metrics. Speed is an important part of making something good, and RoR added significant hurdles to making very fast sites. There are other stacks that don't have that issue that are also successful, but have other downsides. Anyway, not worth rehashing these old arguments, I just wanted to know if it had improved. Sounds like it has.
cutler 10y ago
One thing Rails has over, say, Laravel or Django is the JRuby option which has made significant strides in performance in the last 6 months. There's also Truffle Ruby, Graal and Oracle's Substrate VM which all target Ruby performance so my money is on a significant Ruby resurgence later this year by which time Oracle will likely have open-sourced Substrate VM.

by ericd 10y ago

brightball 10y ago

It is. Come a long way since Rails 2. There are still much faster options out there but it's nowhere near the beast that it used to be.

ericd 10y ago
Great to hear, I might revisit it in a future project then - the experience was generally really nice, but the performance was really painful.
- brightball 10y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Elixir advocate largely because you get the performance and scaling perks of other languages with very close to the development perks of Ruby. I just get tired of hearing the "but Ruby is slow" drum beats when it's so consistently successful. Scaling web servers is easy. Scaling the database is hard.
  - ericd 10y ago
    Yeah, I was just asking if it had improved. Scaling web servers might be easy, but it adds administrative overhead, and if you don't have big piles of VC money to burn, it bites into budgets that would be better used hiring more people and working on product. And it makes it so you have to waste your time reworking your server structure earlier than you would have to otherwise - suddenly you need a load balancer, a shared session store, etc. When I ran a company, these were very real concerns. It being successful doesn't excuse its slowness, in my opinion. There are lots of bad products out there that are successful by many metrics. Speed is an important part of making something good, and RoR added significant hurdles to making very fast sites. There are other stacks that don't have that issue that are also successful, but have other downsides. Anyway, not worth rehashing these old arguments, I just wanted to know if it had improved. Sounds like it has.

cutler 10y ago

One thing Rails has over, say, Laravel or Django is the JRuby option which has made significant strides in performance in the last 6 months. There's also Truffle Ruby, Graal and Oracle's Substrate VM which all target Ruby performance so my money is on a significant Ruby resurgence later this year by which time Oracle will likely have open-sourced Substrate VM.