This story sounds mighty familiar. I realize the topic is about one language over another, and most of the comments here seem to be focusing on that, but there

This story sounds mighty familiar. I realize the topic is about one language over another, and most of the comments here seem to be focusing on that, but there's another part which I find fascinating: the cascading failure mode when they'd lose a web head. "This would in turn cause the load balancer to think it failed and take it out of the pool, thereby applying the load that the unresponsive server would have been handling to the remaining servers. And since the remaining servers are now handling the load of the lost server plus the spike, inevitably a second server would go down, the load balancer would take it out of the pool and so on." It was 8 years ago, and the customer was running PHP, not Ruby, but otherwise it's the same basic story that lead to the creation of "Surge Protector", or its actual name, "Suicide Pact". http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/06/28/sp/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/06/28/sp/