[Chirb] Rails Scaling Experience?

[Troy Denkinger]

I agree, Nate.  I've gotten some great and thoughtful responses both
on the list and privately from my original posting.

Troy

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Nate Kirby <natebkirby at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I personnally would love to get an experienced engineers take on
> performance, scaling, profiling and RoR.  This might make for a great
> session at Chirb.  At least seeing the email traffic would be interesting to
> me.
>
> Blessings,
> Nate
>
> Leon Chism wrote:
>>
>> Hi Troy. I'm currently the CTO of a Rails based startup called
>> Viewpoints.com and was formerly the Chief Architect at Orbitz, so I know a
>> bit about scale, Java, and Ruby. I'd like to help if I can, but it probably
>> makes sense to get into the details of their concerns. If you want to do
>> that on this list, that's fine, otherwise you can email me directly at leon
>> at chism dot org.
>>
>> To get the conversation started:
>>
>> I'm curious what "large scale Rails deployment" means to you. We are not
>> small, but we aren't huge either (Alexa 38,040; Compete 5,684). We have
>> spent a fair amount of time thinking about the metrics to track and how to
>> recreate some of the tools we used in the Java world for
>> ops/monitoring/management.
>>
>> It sounds like the issue is scaling but might also be operationalization
>> of the platform. Have they raised more specific concerns than "we know java
>> better"?
>>
>> leon
>>
>> On May 27, 2008, at 4:00 PM, Troy Denkinger wrote:
>>
>>> All,
>>>
>>> I'm right in the midst of advocating for use of Rails on a project I'm
>>> in the middle of.  I manage a team that has created a service that
>>> runs on Rails.  To date we've been in development and haven't had any
>>> serious outside usage, nor have we deployed on production-ready
>>> hardware.  We are very happy with the ease of development, how
>>> responsive we can be to the business requirements, and the support
>>> we've found within the community at large.
>>>
>>> Recently we have been asked to merge our service into an existing
>>> company that has always used a Java stack in their development.  They
>>> have a couple developers and an operations team that is comfortable
>>> with Java.  The major concern about using our Rails code is that they
>>> are concerned with scaling of Rails apps in general, and they are
>>> using that concern to advocate a port of the existing Rails code to
>>> their Java stack.
>>>
>>> I know one thing that would make the Ops team happy is to talk to
>>> someone who has actual experience with large-scale Rails deployments.
>>> I think they're being rightly pragmatic about this, and I'd like to
>>> find them someone to talk to.  Anyone know anyone who would be willing
>>> to talk a bit about what they've done to scale a Rails installation?
>>> I'm sure I could work up some sort of compensation for someone with
>>> relevant experience who'd like to share it.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Troy
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>