Ahh, you're right. I should have said, "you need to expend some energy on optimization and ensuring reliability." I guess I was making the assumption that the

Ahh, you're right. I should have said, "you need to expend some energy on optimization and ensuring reliability." I guess I was making the assumption that the software was basically working, but failing under heavy load, which seems to be an optimization problem. I let it be given that the software is correct, but perhaps that is not a safe thing to do. And I totally agree that Rails et al are great development platforms to get up and running quickly, but when that software begins to fail with increasing traffic, it's time to first reconsider your own code (algorithms and bulletproofiness (as Colbert might say)), and if that doesn't help, to consider rewriting at least parts in something else. I can't imagine the call stack for a single Rails function call (I'm actually not all that familiar with Rails). At the very least, it might be good to migrate some code from Rails to straight Ruby, and some of the auto-generated stuff to hand-tuned SQL. That's all I was trying to say.