[iagooar]

It might be. I'm not saying it's impossible to scale Rails. It's just very, very hard. Github can do this, because they probably get the best of the best engineers. They even used to have their own, patched Ruby version.

Not everyone can afford that.

[byroot]

Why do you question Rails while the entire report is about Postgres only ?

And as someone working on one of the biggest and oldest Rails codebase out there, I can tell you that in term of scaling, Rails is the least of our concerns.

Sure it's not as efficient, so it's gonna cost you more in CPU and RAM, but it's trivial to scale horizontally. The real worry are the databases, they are fundamentally harder to scale without tradeoffs.

As for the patched Ruby, we used to have one too (but our patches landed upstream so now we run vanilla). It's not about allowing to scale at all. It's simply that once you reach a certain scale, it's profitable to pay a few engineers to improve Ruby's efficiency. If you have 500 app servers, a 1 or 2% performance gain will save enough to pay those engineers salary.

[throw2016]

Depending on hundreds of gems means you are depending on the decisions of hundreds of developers with packages which are in constant churn.

Apps like Gitlab and Discourse that depend on hundreds of gems and require end users to have complex build environment and compile software are I think operating a broken user hostile model.

The potential for compilation failures, version mismatches and Ruby oddities like RVM is so gigantic with hundreds of man hours wasted one is left to conclude they may actually want to run a hosting business and not have users deploy themselves.

Compare that to Go or even PHP where things are so orders of magnitude simper that it is not even the same thing. To deal with this complexity you now have containers but have you solved the complexity or added another layer of complexity? There are technical but I think also social factors at play here.

[byroot]

Regardless of wether I agree or disagree with your critique, it has absolutely no relevance in the context of the current outage.

You don't like Ruby / Rails we get it. But that's totally out of topic.

[iagooar]

I don't think it's that. GitLab IS a complex setup and Rails is not helping making it simple. There is a ton going on in the stack and the company only has limited resources.

[luckystartup]

It's not hard to scale a Rails server, when compared to other frameworks and languages. It's exactly the same as scaling a server written in Java, Node.js, Python, or any other language. You just spin up more machines and put them behind a load balancer.

Yes, Ruby is slower than other programming languages, but this usually doesn't matter. If you are charging people to use your software, or even if you are serving ads, you will always be making money before you need a second server. Plus, Rails is super productive, so you'll be able to build your product much faster.

I'm not sure why GitHub used a patched Ruby version, but no, that's not necessary.

Having said all of that, I'm moving towards Elixir and Phoenix. Not just because of the performance, but also because I really like the language and framework.