[drewbailey]

I'm not sure why this continually comes as such a surprise on HN. It's a mature framework with tons of community involvement and 3rd party gems to help ship features out the door.

The vast amount of projects and internal tools out there don't need to be "webscale" or process millions of requests a minute.

[dasil003]

Also, Rails scales perfectly fine as a stateless web front end. If you have those scaling challenges you need an underlying architecture to handle it, not a silver bullet language.

If you need raw single process performance especially with parallelism then you probably should look beyond ruby. But the whole Rails doesn’t scale because Twitter meme is asinine.

[toasterlovin]

Yeah. Not to mention that it is trivially easy to scale web apps horizontally. So the real bottleneck is the data store, not the programming language you used for your app.

[6t6t6t6]

Who needs to webscale to millions of requests per minute?

Really, the vast majority of web apps built today will see hundreds of requests per minute.

Still, Github and Shopify have proven that Rails can scale to hundreds of thousands of requests per second. Which is a great number.

Said that, if my goal was to build an app with a simple set of features that don't change often, and that will serve 100 million users, where none of them is paying user, I would probably not choose Rails.

[khalilravanna]

> if my goal was to build an app with a simple set of features that don't change often, and that will serve 100 million users, where none of them is paying user, I would probably not choose Rails.

What would you choose in this case? I'm also a little confused where the user "paying" comes in. Is that in terms of the importance of that specific type of interaction or the concern of friction scaring of "free" users?

[goatlover]

Go, Elixir or Java would seem like good options for building something that could handle that many users. If the expectation is 100 million users, then you're truly building for scale, not how fast you can get an app out the door.

[ericb]

I have a hard time seeing Shopify and Github as anything other than "web scale."

[Retric]

Depends on what your comparing them to.

They are dwarfed by most media companies etc. Github's website sees far less than 1% of Facebook's traffic for example. On the other hand they have almost 30 million users so they are not exactly tiny.

[drewbailey]

Regardless it helped them initially scale and attract users by shipping features and focusing on proving their business. Down the road as they attracted users they kept their rails core but started adding in other systems that were met their performance needs.

Rails allows companies to grow quickly and focus on attracting users and delivering business value at the sacrifice of a re-write or complexity of managing rails and performance issues down the road.

[mirceal]

Isn’t Github on sinatra?