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What kind of hosting infrastructure was involved? You're only looking at part of the picture, I think. It's not just a matter of asking, "will the site hold up

What kind of hosting infrastructure was involved? You're only looking at part of the picture, I think. It's not just a matter of asking, "will the site hold up?", but rather it's one of "will the site hold up, given an economically-feasible amount of resources?" Throwing a lot of resources at a Ruby on Rails site for one day of heavy traffic is one thing. Having to do that for years on end just to maintain a reasonable level of service in the face of growth is a very different thing, and far closer to the reality that we have to deal with.

derwiki 14y ago
Colo with 17 app servers. We didn't have to spin up additional workers, and this is about half the number of web servers the last startup-turn-IPO I worked at used (and they used Python!).
- fpal3 14y ago
  2647 connections per server per second is pretty abysmal for modern server hardware, especially if you had to rely on a whole bunch of caching front-end complication and proxy web servers to make it happen.
  - FooBarWidget 14y ago
    You can't say that without knowing what the app does. A recent project that I've been involved with switch from Java to Ruby and they reduced the number of servers by 10 times (!). But I don't blame Java, I blame the programmers of the last code base. You can write unmaintainable messes in any language.
    - PommeDeTerre 14y ago
      Were the exact same servers reused? I once interviewed a Rails developer who was bragging about a Java-to-Ruby conversion he'd worked on. He was proud that they went from 50 servers running the Java system to only 30 for the Ruby one. Upon further questioning, he admitted that those 50 servers used by the Java system were from 2003, and the ones powering the Ruby-based system were from 2011! They didn't even halve the number of servers required, but the new servers were many, many times more powerful than the old ones.

derwiki 14y ago

Colo with 17 app servers. We didn't have to spin up additional workers, and this is about half the number of web servers the last startup-turn-IPO I worked at used (and they used Python!).

fpal3 14y ago
2647 connections per server per second is pretty abysmal for modern server hardware, especially if you had to rely on a whole bunch of caching front-end complication and proxy web servers to make it happen.
- FooBarWidget 14y ago
  You can't say that without knowing what the app does. A recent project that I've been involved with switch from Java to Ruby and they reduced the number of servers by 10 times (!). But I don't blame Java, I blame the programmers of the last code base. You can write unmaintainable messes in any language.
  - PommeDeTerre 14y ago
    Were the exact same servers reused? I once interviewed a Rails developer who was bragging about a Java-to-Ruby conversion he'd worked on. He was proud that they went from 50 servers running the Java system to only 30 for the Ruby one. Upon further questioning, he admitted that those 50 servers used by the Java system were from 2003, and the ones powering the Ruby-based system were from 2011! They didn't even halve the number of servers required, but the new servers were many, many times more powerful than the old ones.