[lukeasrodgers]

As someone with a fair bit of ruby+rails+redis experience, I don't think this is blasphemous, but I also don't think the performance issues of ruby/rails having anything to do with the failure. Generally you would cache/store something in redis not because your programming language or framework is slow, but because a query to another database is slow (or at least, slower than redis), or because redis data structures happen to be a good/quick way to store certain kinds of data.

I believe the fundamental issue was just that redis availability was taken for granted by app servers so that certain code paths/requests would fail if it wasn't available, rather than merely be slower.