3 ms·

I don't entirely disagree. All I can say is REE and Rails 2.3 were far lighter weight and faster than Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.2. Given it's a 3.5 year old app, t

I don't entirely disagree. All I can say is REE and Rails 2.3 were far lighter weight and faster than Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.2. Given it's a 3.5 year old app, the landscape was pretty different back then. I looked at Lift and didn't like it. Django was still in a weird place. And ultimately Rails looked like the best option for a variety of reasons. Things evolve and whole hog rewrites are difficult. Nowadays we run in JRuby and things are quite a bit better. But we can't run on anything smaller than an m1.large. The low I/O and meager RAM in a c1.medium preclude its use. (BTW, that's where a lot of the original 15 came from -- with a process using 100 MB RAM and only 1.7 GB available, it's hard to squeeze much more out of that). But the larger point is with virtually any other provider you can pick a configuration that matches the needs of your app (rather than the other way around), don't have to fight with CPU steal, don't have to fight with over-subscribed hardware, and don't have to deal with machine configurations from 2006. Yeah, Rails is never going to outperform your Scala web service. But if the app would run just fine on the other N - 1 providers, then it's disingenuous to gloss over the execution environment as well.

bad_user 13y ago
Yes, JRuby should be much better. Run it on top of JDK 7 and use the CMS garbage collector, as JRuby (and Scala) tend to generate a lot of short-term garbage and experiment with the new generation proportion (something like -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:NewRatio=1 -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=850). You can also profile memory usage (make sure you're not stressing the GC, as that can steal away CPU resources) and for that I believe you can use Java profilers (like YourKit which is pretty good). Also, try to do more stuff async, like in another thread, process or server. Use caching where it's easy, but don't over do it, as dealing with complex cache invalidation policies is a PITA.

bad_user 13y ago

Yes, JRuby should be much better. Run it on top of JDK 7 and use the CMS garbage collector, as JRuby (and Scala) tend to generate a lot of short-term garbage and experiment with the new generation proportion (something like -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:NewRatio=1 -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=850). You can also profile memory usage (make sure you're not stressing the GC, as that can steal away CPU resources) and for that I believe you can use Java profilers (like YourKit which is pretty good). Also, try to do more stuff async, like in another thread, process or server. Use caching where it's easy, but don't over do it, as dealing with complex cache invalidation policies is a PITA.