[bphogan]

Rails has been dealing with the 'can't scale' accusations forever, even though it has been scaling fine for a lot of people for at least 4 years, if not longer.

But remember that a lot of people who start with Rails are not sysadmins, and may have absolutely no idea how to scale anything. I'd bet they'd probably hit the same scaling trouble if they used anything.

If you listen to folks that have had to scale out to meet demand, you hear the same thing repeated: once you get beyond a certain number of connections, things like choice of language level out and you have other things to worry about. Default installs of WordPress don't scale either, because of database load. That doesn't necessarily mean that WordPress can't scale.

Like anything else, Rails can scale, but often times those deploying it just don't know how. I know I sure didn't when I started out. And every web project I've been on has had different scaling needs. Rails has, in my experience, been easier to scale out than the ASP or PHP apps I used to maintain.