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by shadowsun7 5734 days ago
Was that a self-referential comment? I'm not sure how you're contributing to the discussion here.
2 comments

Oops, I did not realize that you are the same person who I had replied to till later. Well, I'll assume you aren't trolling then, but realize that many shared the sentiment for good reason (the comment was at 5 points surprisingly, before I made the last, very stupid reply). The reason would be that there have been thousands of wasted programmer hours due to discussions initiated by someone saying "rails can't scale", when they obviously don't know what they're talking about, so it does come off as trollish.

It became a something many said because of Twitter's scaling problems, which is probably how you heard about it. But later, it became clear and commonly accepted among the community that Twitter's scaling problems did not stem from rails itself, but other parts of its infrastructure. Saying "rails doesn't scale" really doesn't make too much sense, because scaling the application layer is arguably the easiest part of scaling: essentially you add more app servers, and load balance between them. The hard part is scaling the database etc.

In Twitter, at first they had a lot of issues because the queuing software they wrote wasn't great for their workloads and was pretty slow. And there are a ton of other moving parts as well in the application and the team must have kept hitting walls in all the various parts. They may have even had some rails issues at some point, but that's a far cry from saying it can't scale.

And anyways, if you want to keep it light weight, I'd use one of the smaller Ruby frameworks. You really can't go wrong with Sinatra.

Welcome to HN, binomial. You can assume that we're not trolling (most of the time). Thank you for the clarification.
I was trying to see to it that people don't respond to the trolling as if it were a real question. If it was a real question, perhaps the person needs to do some research.