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So apparently we're still discussing this and you can find variations on this article stretching back a long time https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&p

So apparently we're still discussing this and you can find variations on this article stretching back a long time https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=ruby%20slow&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Like everything engineering it really depends though, and Ruby is sadly quite slow. Twitter was rough before they replaced Rails. Most Ruby devops tools I've used have been substantially slower than tools built in other languages (e.g. Puppet vs Ansible). Ruby certainly still has value as a tool, but it should be understood to be one that isn't very performance focused.

berkes 4y ago
You are right. And I tried to link to as many relevant previous articles in my article here. Still, I think it is good to keep sharing this. If only because writing a blog-post allows me to organize my thoughts on this ;) WRT the twitter story: correct. But that conflates Rails with Ruby and it uses a case that is quite exceptional. Ruby is only a part of why Rails is slow. Rails is mostly slow because of the heavy and poorly optimized reliance on the database (as I argue in the article) and because of it's immensly complicated layering and dataflow. A single DateTime from a database might pass through some thousands of classes and methods before being send off in a body of HTML. Ruby is a problem here, because tousands of times "something rather slow" makes it very slow. But the "thousands of layers" really is a problem in itself. Without rails it could easily be less than hundred and you'll still have a neat architecture and layering and stuff. The other thing is that no-one except twitter (and maybe three, four other companies) are operating on that kind of scale. At such scale, entirely different metrics start to matter than what we usually encounter on a typical 2000 MAU SAAS product.

berkes 4y ago

You are right. And I tried to link to as many relevant previous articles in my article here. Still, I think it is good to keep sharing this. If only because writing a blog-post allows me to organize my thoughts on this ;) WRT the twitter story: correct. But that conflates Rails with Ruby and it uses a case that is quite exceptional. Ruby is only a part of why Rails is slow. Rails is mostly slow because of the heavy and poorly optimized reliance on the database (as I argue in the article) and because of it's immensly complicated layering and dataflow. A single DateTime from a database might pass through some thousands of classes and methods before being send off in a body of HTML. Ruby is a problem here, because tousands of times "something rather slow" makes it very slow. But the "thousands of layers" really is a problem in itself. Without rails it could easily be less than hundred and you'll still have a neat architecture and layering and stuff. The other thing is that no-one except twitter (and maybe three, four other companies) are operating on that kind of scale. At such scale, entirely different metrics start to matter than what we usually encounter on a typical 2000 MAU SAAS product.