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by Tichy 5368 days ago
V8 is a lot faster than Ruby, so I'd expect page rendering to be a lot faster with Node than with Ruby (supposing both use good rendering engines).

Also it seems a lot easier to "outsource" computationally intensive tasks to other processes with Node than with Rails. With node you can stall the response until you receive a result of the computation (within limits), and use the wait time for other tasks. With Rails if you do that, you block one thread of your limited pool of threads. As an example: with my first Heroku Rails app (free hosting) I discovered the pool of threads was one.
1 comments
rbranson 5368 days ago
That's a limitation of Rails, not Ruby. One could use Node.js in the same manner. Ruby has been doing async I/O in the form of EventMachine longer than Node.js has even existed.
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Tichy 5368 days ago
NodeJS builds on some C async framework, so pretty much every language build on C could go the Node route - but it would be a lot of work. Personally I wish somebody would adapt it for Arc - or maybe not, so that if I ever apply to YC again I can do that for bonus points :-)

EventMachine is OK, I suppose, but I have heard that it has some warts. Are there any good web frameworks that build on EventMachine? Though I suppose the basic Sinatra-Style framework would not be that hard to build...

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mnutt 5368 days ago
As of 1.3, Sinatra can do streaming using an evented webserver like Thin, which uses EventMachine. Goliath may also be worth checking out.
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