Taking the other side for a moment, I think things like EC2 and S3 could help mitigate some of the costs of scaling RoR apps like this. Thought out prior to mak

Taking the other side for a moment, I think things like EC2 and S3 could help mitigate some of the costs of scaling RoR apps like this. Thought out prior to making rash decisions like buying dedicated servers from Joyent at a high cost, you could possibly save your company quite a bit of cash. However, I do agree that Ruby (and Rails) needs to get its act together. Sure, its never going to be the best, but the ease of development and deployment and (etc.) makes it very, very hard to turn down. BTW: 25 servers to service up to 400 images per second is inaccurate. It only took them 8 asset servers to serve that amount of images. Even so, that is pretty ridiculous. I would have to say that they didn't spend time optimizing their asset servers, or anything else other than Ruby. I think it could be done better.