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Twitter's better performance is because of a better architecture than Java language. Further, the performance is from JVM, so you can use any of the JVM languag
by gary4gar 14y ago
Twitter's better performance is because of a better architecture than Java language. Further, the performance is from JVM, so you can use any of the JVM language including JRuby to get similar effects.
This articles seems more like link-bait to me.
- jrockway 14y agoI agree. I think I could write a scalable Twitter in mostly Ruby. And I've never written a line of Ruby in my life.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- scribu 14y agoHave you worked on other sites with a similar scale to Twitter? If not, how would you know?
- jrockway 14y agoI work at Google :)
- shanelja 14y agoWell, there's pretty much no response he can give to that then. Unless of course, you work in the marketing department or clean the buildings?
- gary4gar 14y ago<!-- insert *evil grin* here -->
- scribu 14y agoFair enough :)
- boyter 14y agoBased on that I would like to hear how you would do so. Would make an interesting blog post or comment here.
- sbuk 14y agoAnd..?
- kooshball 14y agoThen you should really know better than to make statements like "I think I could write a scalable Twitter in mostly Ruby. And I've never written a line of Ruby in my life."
- jrockway 14y agoThis isn't really a comment on Java, Ruby, Twitter, Google, or my programming ability. It's a comment about the fact that once you've designed a scalable distributed system, the constant factor runtime isn't so important. Twitter has clearly engineered a working distributed system (or you would have read stories like "5% of Twitter users lost their tweets when our servers caught on fire last night"), so the fact that they wrote it in Scala or Java is largely irrelevant. They need fewer computers than they would have if they wrote it in Ruby again, and that's not something to discount, but I think it's technically possible to have a full Ruby stack do what Twitter does. And, they would have needed even fewer computers if they used C or C++. So it's clear that Java was a social choice (it had the right books, libraries, and stack of resumes) rather than an absolute must. Besides, Ruby and Java both make the same C library calls to do I/O. So it all ends up being the same for everything except search, trending tweets, and other cpu-intensive analysis.
- thebluesky 14y agoI think I could write a scalable Twitter using mostly low-paid workers who manually write down the tweets and deliver them in person. It's just a matter of hiring enough workers now that I've designed this scalable distributed system.
- jrockway 14y agoComputers are easier (though perhaps less fun) to make than humans. Ruby is slow but it's close enough to Java that the numbers will still work out. Humans: probably not.
- thebluesky 14y ago
- ilamparithi 14y agoI suppose it doesn't matter if you didn't work on similar scaling problems in Google.
- jrockway 14y agoYou're right and I know that "appeal to authority" is not a valid argument mechanism. With that in mind, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to make an amusing comment.
- logn 14y agoI don't think so. Java outperforms JRuby, probably because of typing. See: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=jruby http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...
- extension 14y agoJava probably outperforms JRuby primarily because the JVM was designed and tuned to run Java. But in any case, if Twitter's architecture is truly scalable then any intrinsic slowness of the language shouldn't be a big problem, because they can just toss more hardware in to compensate. What is a problem is a buggy VM that leaks memory. To run thousands of instances in a heavily instrumented way, the VM must be stable and predictable.
- thebluesky 14y agoStatically vs dynamically typed peformance difference is clear for virtually any static or dynamic language you care to name, it has nothing to do with the jvm being "tuned" for a language: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
- justincormack 14y agoOnly when they removed LuaJIT from the shootout, it is dynamic and fast (it was around where Java is in the benchmarks).
- thebluesky 14y agoThe LuaJIT performance is pretty impressive for a dynamically typed language, but it's hard to deny the fact that mainstream dynamically typed languages our outperformed by their static counterparts.
- justincormack 14y agoThats partly because they were not designed for performance. Lua of course was as it was designed partly for slow small systems. But pypy is getting on pretty well too and javascript, showing what you can do even if not designed for performance.