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by nirvdrum 487 days ago
If the the Twitter fail whale is your concern, then your perception is outdated. Twitter started moving off Ruby in 2009. Both the CRuby VM and Rails have seen extensive development during that decade and a half.

I never worked at Twitter, but based on the timeline it seems very likely they were running on the old Ruby 1.8.x line, which was a pure AST interpreter. The VM is now a bytecode interpreter that has been optimized over the intervening years. The GC is considerably more robust. There's a very fast JIT compiler included. Many libraries have been optimized and bugs squashed.

If your concern is Rails, please note that also has seen ongoing development and is more performant, more robust, and I'd say better architected. I'm not even sure it was thread-safe when Twitter was running on it.

You don't have to like Ruby or Rails, but you're really working off old data. I'm sure there's a breaking point in there somewhere, but I very much doubt most apps will hit in before going bust.
1 comments
ksec 487 days ago
The CRuby VM, or the CRuby interpreter alone is at least 2-3x faster since Fail Whale time. And JIT doubles that to 4 - 6x. Rails itself also gotten 1.5x to 2x faster.

And then you have CPU that is 20 - 30x faster compared to 2009. SSD that is 100x - 1000x faster, Database that is much more battle tested and far easier to scale.

Sometimes I wonder, may be we could remake twitter with Rails again to see how well it goes.

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caiusdurling 487 days ago
> Sometimes I wonder, may be we could remake twitter with Rails again to see how well it goes.

Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails (:

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radlad 487 days ago
Maybe not the best testimonial. From what I've heard, Mastodon is a bit of a beast to scale. While some of this is probably due to ActivityPub (a la https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/11/14/scaling-mastodon/) itself, some of it may be related to Ruby's execution model: https://lukas.zapletalovi.com/posts/2022/why-mastodon-instan...

My issue with Ruby (and Rails) has always been the "ball of mud" problem that I feel originates from its extensive use of syntactical sugar and automagic.

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