That's not on a per-host basis. Shopify's design is, quite fortunately, one that partitions really well, as each store is completely independent of each other.
Each store can be assigned to one pod, each pod can have as many hosts as it takes to optimize the use of a database instance, and then you can add more pods as the need arises.
Edit: to be clear, that's not to say Rails can't scale. It can. It's just that it doesn't need to- you can scale anything with enough partitioning.
Well, Shopify is investing in optimizing Ruby, so they believe Ruby was the component with the most opportunity for improvement. And the results are showing there was indeed lots of places where improvements could be made.
That's like saying the leading F1 team is investing in optimizing side mirrors, therefore they believe side mirrors are the component with the most opportunity for improvement.
The fact is that performance oriented organizations optimize everything unless they have math telling them it isn't worth optimizing.
> The fact is that performance oriented organizations optimize everything unless they have math telling them it isn't worth optimizing.
Most companies don’t have unlimited budgets. Performance-oriented organizations profile and then spend money where profiling tells them to. Shopify isn’t hiring people to contribute to MySQL or Redis internals. They hired a full team to work on Ruby internals, not just creating YJIT, but also on CRuby’s memory layout, hiring the lead on TruffleRuby, and funding academic programming language research on Ruby.
No company has an infinite budget to “optimize everything”. It is clear where internal performance testing pointed Shopify (at Ruby) and with double digit gains being extracted year after year, their profiling didn’t lie. And other Ruby on Rails shops are seeing similar double digit performance wins, not on fake benchmarks, but on actual page load times and traffic that can be handled by a server.
Disclaimer: I'm a member of the Ruby & Rails infrastructure team at Shopify and Ruby committer.
> Shopify isn’t hiring people to contribute to MySQL or Redis internals
You are not wrong, but the main reason is that contrary to Ruby, MySQL and Redis are used by a lot of huge companies and are themselves owned by companies with full time people on it.
In comparison Ruby is still mostly a volunteer ran project that receive little funding and effort relative to its importance.
As for why trying to make Ruby faster at all in the first place. It's not because it was too slow, it's mostly just that at our scale, the engineering time spent on optimizing the runtime pretty much pays for itself.
But that's nothing specific to Ruby, in most very large software companies you will find similar efforts. e.g. I remember Twitter had a team working on the JVM, etc.
Most companies don’t have unlimited budgets. Performance-oriented organizations profile and then spend money where profiling tells them to.
The bizarre part here is that anyone who paint themselves into a corner with ruby, then decide that they need to implement an entire new fancy VM instead of just find targeted bottlenecks and rewriting them in C++. They writing complicated native programs to make a VM that is only 15% faster when they could rewrite specific sections that are slow and speed those up by 200x or more.
Of course, most teams do. Some teams have had 2 revisions to side mirrors this season.. and of course it didn't decide the WC, which is my point. Organizations don't merely optimize "the bottleneck" they optimize everything worth optimizing.
Sort of. Twice as many rails hosts means more DB connections which generally means more load/memory on the DB or more load/memory on the external connection pooler.
It's only a bit of incremental load, but it's easy to overlook how many other systems need to run to make Rails scale.
No he’s his examples he’s talking 50 stores over 10 machines vs 50 stores over 5 machines. Both would require the same DB count, but the second would save on server costs for stores.
I'm sorry, but this is one of the silliest nit picks ive ever seen on this site. Of course 1 million rps and 3TB/s isn't coming from a single host. 3 TB/s is far beyond the throughput of any network I've ever seen, considered or thought of, short of maybe a data center (and I don't work in that domain). 1.3 million requests per second is far beyond the capacity of pretty much any hardware available right now.
Async Rust has not been around long enough for lots of examples. Go has plenty of them. Rust is powering big parts of CloudFlare along with Go, which is way bigger scale. AWS also has big parts done in Rust.
> And how many instances would be required if Go/Rust would have been used?
Zero. Because Shopify would have waited until Rust came out in 2015, instead of launching in 2006, and they would never have gotten off the ground and been another failed techbro startup that instead of getting shit done, bikeshedded over languages.
PHP and Ruby apps have generated far more revenues than all the Rust and Golang code combined.
Rails was a great choice for Shopify, GitHub and Stripe, no doubt. No one is questioning that.
GP’s sarcastic “rails doesn’t scale” implies that it would also be a great choice for people starting afresh in 2023. The reply asks for a comparison with other languages popular in 2023, especially ones that are known for being more performant (lower memory and CPU consumption, lower latency).
And that’s when you’re dragging the conversation back to 2006. It’s not 2006 anymore.
Rails was initially too slow for Github, so they forked it, didn't use "Rails" for a while [1], lost literal engineering years to upgrading it (same for Shopify), and now Github has an engineering department dedicated to working of the Rails master branch directly, which is huge engineering overhead and a problem and solution that shouldn't exist. Github co-founder Tom lamented using Rails at Github and has stopped using it [2].
If you're Github or Shopify and can throw (waste?) engineering years at solving a framework specific ecosystem nightmare problems, and have the klout and runway to hire core Ruby and Rails maintainers, then you're probably in a highly unique situation and could use any framework you want.
The rest of us don't see Rails as a great choice for Github. Doubt and questioning.
Please listen to the Github engineers in the provided links.
> We forked rails and _practically wrote our own._ We fought against the framework. We deviated from the framework, and we even wondered if rails was right for us at all.
and
> Rails 3 was found to be five times slower than Rails 2
Yes, not ideal. But we can’t know what would have happened if they had chosen a different language in 2007. Did they have the option of an efficient, well supported language that continues to be used in 2023? Maybe Java, although Java languished for years before development picked up again. C# is also a candidate.
But one thing we can’t measure - how many candidates chose to join Shopify and GitHub because they were keen to work on Ruby? Java had a reputation for being boring, while Ruby was fun and exciting. Their success was possibly tied to this, but we’ll never know for sure.
In 2023 the calculus of what language to choose is different. But these companies are just glad they succeeded while others didn’t.
The problem is at the time if you want things done fast, Rails was the right choice. Almost no startup would touch Spring as app server at the time. Django had not reached 1.0 yet, and it's not faster anyway. So for a startup, Rails was the only realistic choices.
You're implying that those languages made actual building products easier. I think we know by now they didn't. Go is a language which preaches building your boilerplate than reusing it. Produces very little of the economies of scale requires to build compelling products. It has other advantages, and the single binary thing captured a niche in infrastructure software, but that's it outside of Google. Rust is still young, jury is out, but it's already considered a big and hard to learn language, and that's not going to change soon. It'll eventually find a niche.
Ruby is still a great way to start it up. Consider that in 2006-2008, it's deployment story was horrible. Since then, the ruby ecosystem bootstrapped lockfiles, 12 factor app manifesto, and a lot of the conventions we all take for granted nowadays. And while there are certainly enough arguments to bikeshed on, its still a rock solid ecosystem.
Google has a lot of revenue. Pinterest, Hashicorp, Uber, Twitch, Dropbox, etc. all have a good amount of golang and collectively have a lot of revenue. It might need a few more years to tip the scale, but it's closer than suggested here.
> Or they could have used something available in 2006, like C++, Java, .NET/C#, OCaml, Haskell, D.
Going for .NET/C# would have likely limited anyone to using mostly Windows Server for their infrastructure. Not that it's a bad OS, but .NET Core was released only in 2016 and although Mono came out in 2004, sadly it never got the love it deserved and was rather unreliable (otherwise we would have seen way more cross platform development before .NET Core). Oh, also, turns out that LINQ (which is pretty cool) was only released in 2007, though that still puts them a bit ahead of Java I guess, although I can't comment on when it landed in Mono.
Going with Java would have meant using something like Java 6, whereas the first truly decent version (in my eyes) was Java 8, which came out in 2014. Of course, the older language version and runtime wouldn't be a huge issue, however projects like Spring Boot only came out in 2014 and before then most people would either use Spring, Java EE (now Jakarta EE) or a similar framework from back then. I've worked with both and it wasn't pleasant - essentially the XML configuration hell with layers of indirection that people lament.
I mean, either would have probably been doable, but it's not like other stacks are without fault (even the ones I cannot really comment on).
> Stackoverflow is doing just fine with Windows Server.
Good for them! I guess it mostly depends on what you want to build your platform around, what the constraints are and what developer skillsets are popular in your market.
> Java 6 would still blow the water out of Ruby's slow interpreter.
It would actually be fun if someone pulled out the old versions from back then and did some benchmarks, though maybe asking someone to build a full stack application in such a dated tech would be a tough ask, unless they're passionate about it!
> Being pleasant isn't relevant for performance.
If the discussion is just about performance, then that's true.
If we look at things realistically, then there's more to it - like using a tech stack that allows you to iterate reasonably quickly, as opposed to making your developers want to quit their jobs every time they have to debug some obscure Servlet related bug or to work with brittle configuration in XML (been there dozens of times), to the point where not as much could even get built in a given amount of time with a particular stack due to its challenges.
I do hate when people say that additional nodes are way cheaper than developer salaries, but they're also correct most of the time. Of course, there's also the humanitarian take to just not forget about the developer experience, otherwise we'd have written all of our web software in C++ even back then. It'd work really fast, but we'd have way less software in general.
C# in 2006 was a joke, probably worse than Rails in performance. This was the webforms era and old EF - meant for enterprise customers with a couple of hundred active users max... ASP.NET being a competitive/performant framework is a very recent development (since core basically which became usable past 2.0)
Haskell, OCaml and D are niche languages, probably aren't mature enough now to use for a production system that needs to scale (in terms of org growth and building complex systems).
Java web frameworks were also terrible in 2006 (this is the Java era that gave Java it's reputation) and the only thing worse for productivity I can think of is C++ hahaha ...
All of them were faster and used less resources than a very slow interpreted language, by having JIT and AOT compilers, state of the art GC and great IDE offerings, even the niche ones had better tooling (Leksah and Merlin, versus nothing).
Nobody cares about performance if you build a business application with a couple of users, a common use-case in 2005. The reason a lot of Java people jumped on the Rails bandwagon, was that an application that would take a month to build in Java with Spring/Hibernate, would take a day in Rails.
See also: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beyond-java/0596100949/
No they weren't - ASP.NET webforms and old EF was such a pile of shit it didn't matter how fast C# was (and back then it really wasn't, granted order of magnitude better than ruby/python, but way behind JVM). The applications built with it were dog slow and buggy - they couldn't even scale in enterprise setting.
Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?
I mean you're suggesting people use C++ for writing web apps (and c++98/03 no less !) - that's got to be facetious.
The real contender back then was PHP and Java, RoR really addressed a lot of issues from both. They both adopted the improvements brought by it since, but it took years.
That was then and this is now. If you are building under endless VC money go ahead burn it. Most of us however do not have endless stacks of money to burn runing our code.
If you think time-to-market, and overall cost are going to be improved by building your vanilla website in Rust or Go, vs Rails, then I think you may be surprised
Yeah it’s nearly the main benefit of Ruby/Rails that you can spin up an mvp of your company in like a week, and have a decent feature set within a couple months.
The trap is when you start growing and it is hard to change. Because the features that took 1-2 months in RoR might take 3-4 months (or more!) to port to another language, and do you really want to stop your working business when it isn’t a problem?
Because Rails performs totally fine at small-mid startup scale. It’s only when you start getting a couple years old with lots of users that it starts to bite you. But at that point you already have gotten further than 90% of startups ever even make it. And at that point, honestly there are solutions for that too, like gradually pulling the poor-performing bits out into faster languages.
Writing this as someone who works for a startup that uses RoR, and I’ve seen it blow up over several years. I curse RoR daily because it pisses me off, but I don’t think this company would’ve gotten this far if it didn’t have the RoR speed at the beginning.
So are you better off starting your company on Go/Rust/Java? Maybe. But if getting to market fast will help you win, it’s hard to beat RoR.
> Most of us however do not have endless stacks of money to burn runing our code.
This is such an absurd take. Do you really think startups lose runway because of the runtime performance of their code, and not failing to achieve PMF, overhiring, or spending too much on stupid techbro bullshit?
These two points are entirely unrelated. Scaleability in that meme is not considering horizontal scalability, which approaches infinity for literally any language/framework. It only makes sense in the context of vertical scalability, and gross req/sec offers no insight into whether or not that's true.
I can't see how vertical scalability even matters for rails You can just start more instances. It's not like two active web requests need to interact with each other.
You don't even have to write performant code. You can just start as many instances of the rails app as you want. The bottleneck is usually the database.
Partly, you need mobile now, so any Rails stuff is likely to be back-end and hidden. Plus big investors like to go for the exciting stuff.
But if you're looking at companies aren't household names (taking smaller amounts of investment), there are lots out there.
Syft (recruitment) were founded in 2016 and have revenues of over $100m per year - although that's partly due to acquisition by a larger competitor, so when I just looked, separating their valuation from the group wasn't immediately obvious.
I've freelanced and contracted across a few niche industries (construction, print, airport signage management!) where I was building something against competitor software that I discovered was at least partially built with Rails. Those big players in each niche would have revenue in the tens of millions and from what I could see, very small technical teams.
But anyone outside those industries would never have heard of these companies.
No exactly a fair question because Shopify is much older and is valued at 70B. For a company to have done it in half the time would have been impressive regardless of tech whereas on average it takes 7 years to become a unicorn.
I do know that Aircall is relatively young, on a good trajectory and runs Rails.
Each store can be assigned to one pod, each pod can have as many hosts as it takes to optimize the use of a database instance, and then you can add more pods as the need arises.
Edit: to be clear, that's not to say Rails can't scale. It can. It's just that it doesn't need to- you can scale anything with enough partitioning.