[dlisboa]

> The usual response to this complaint in the Ruby/Rails community is that optimizing for nanoseconds, or even milliseconds doesn't matter when the same operation also involves multiple database queries or API calls

The problem with that logic is that it’s pervasive: people have that same attitude everywhere even if no IO is being done. That’s how we get multi gigabyte processes.

The whole language (and Rails) also pushes you towards a less efficient path. For instance you’re probably iterating over those six plans and inserting them individually in the DB. Another approach would’ve been to accumulate all of them in memory then build and perform a single query. That’s not something people really consider because it’s “micro” optimization and makes the code look worse. But if you miss out on hundreds of these micro optimizations then you get a worse system.

In a general sense optimizing Ruby is indeed futile: any optimization is dwarfed by just choosing a different language.

I say all this as someone who has worked with it for two decades, I like the language, it’s just laughably inefficient.

[radanskoric]

Have you used it over the last few years? It has it been rapidly improving, mainly because Shopify put a team full time on it. It doesn’t take a lot of people to optimize a VM/interpreter it just has to be the right people.

And the question is always “fast enough for what?” Different languages are more suitable for different types of projects. I wouldn’t code a rendering engine in Ruby but for web apps it’s amazing.

[dlisboa]

Yes, every web app I’ve worked on the past ~18 years has been with Rails. I’ve seen it all except an efficient app. Sure, Ruby and Rails never bankrupted these companies but they’d all have been better off with something else. Certain cloud bills would’ve been much smaller for sure.

Those optimizations to the VM are just very workload specific and become less relevant today when you’re using containers and fractional CPU/mem. It also doesn’t take much for a dev to write the wrong code and make them irrelevant again. Even if you get everything right you’re leaving so much performance on the table it feels like crumbs.

For small web apps Rails is fine though. I just never worked on one. The issue is perhaps no one threw the code away when it got big.

[radanskoric]

Can you explain why you say they would be better off? What else would be a better choice and why?

[whstl]

Not GP but I can answer:

Rails apps can get very expensive server wise because the “IO is slow anyways” attitude means more servers will be needed to serve the same amount of requests. For a specific bad case I worked at, the cloud bill was the same cost of 15 senior developers. And it was an app without external users (I was actually responsible for the external parts of it, it was isolated and not in Rails).

Excessive abstraction at the ORM can also make it extremely difficult to optimize db queries, so each user request can trigger way more DB queries than necessary, and this will require more db power. I have seen this happening over and over due to abstraction layers such as Trailblazer, but anything that is too layered clean-code style will cause issues and requires constant observation. And refactoring is made difficult due to “magic”. Even LLMs might find it too much.

Another problem with the slowness is that it slows down local development too. The biggest test suite I ever saw took 2 hours to run in a 60-machine cluster, so 120 hours of CI. Impossible to run locally, so major refactoring was borderline impossible without a huge feedback cycle.

The solution for the slow development ends up being hiring more developers, of course, with each one responsible for a smaller part of the app. In other companies these kind of features I saw would be written by people over days, not by team over months.

The terseness of both Ruby and Rails is also IMO countered by the culture of turning 10-line methods into bigger classes and using methods and instance variables instead of local variables. So it also hurts both readability (because now you have 5x more lines than needed) but also hurts optimization and stresses the garbage collection. If you know this, you know. I have seen this in code from North+Latin American, European and Japanese companies, so it’s not isolated cases. If you don’t know I can provide examples.

I have seen this happening with other tech too, of course, but with Rails it happens much much faster IME.

It is also 100% preventable, of course, however a lot of advice on how to prevent these problems will clash with Ruby/Rails traditions and culture.

These are just examples out of personal experience, but definitely not isolated cases IMO.

[dlisboa]

Just want to reiterate what the sibling commenter said, it's dead on with my experience.

Static typing would be the main thing teams would've been better off with. I was big on dynamic languages, love Clojure/LISPs and still work with Ruby and JS today, but you just can't trust 100 developers with it. Last company I worked for I ran the dev team and did some bug analysis: conservatively 60% of bugs were things a simple static type system would've caught.

Very few business logic bugs. We had loads of tests but these simple bugs still popped up. Someone in team A would change a method's return type, find and replace in the codebase, but miss some obscure case from team D. Rinse and repeat. Nothing complicated, just discipline but you can't trust discipline on a 500k LoC codebase and a language with no guardrails.

Performance would've been the other main advantage of static typing. While most people think their Rails app will be IO-bound forever that's really downplaying their product. In actuality every company that mildly succeeds will start to acquire CPU-bound workloads and it'll come a point where they are the bottleneck. One might argue that it is at this point you ditch Ruby but in reality no one really wants to run a polyglot company: it's hard to hire, hard to fill in gaps, hard to manage and evaluate talent.

People underestimate the impact of performance on the bottom line these days with phrases like "memory is cheap; devs are not". Like the sibling commenter put it the monthly cloud bill on that last company would've paid about 20 dev salaries. Most of that was for the app servers. That for an app that served about 500 req/sec at peak. You can imagine the unnecessary pressure that puts on the company's finances.

Better choices would've been Go, Rust, even something on the JVM.

[chucke]

Static typing has come, there's RBS, which has (finally) coalesced (after adding support for inlining in code) as the blessed type notation, supported by both steep and sorbet. Considering that big companies have adopted it, I'd say that the community agrees and has done something about it. But as you can imagine, many ruby apps have been stuck in legacy for years.

About performance, not sure how you think static typing could solve it, but considering the significant investment recently in JITs, in particular YJIT and ZJIT, again, the big apps seem to agree with you and have done something about it?

Even if you ditch CRuby for the JVM, you can still use JRuby, and still leverage the language while not being pulled down by the runtime.

It's not like you're without options.

[whstl]

Yep.

The thing about "it's IO bound anyway so who cares" is that it forces you to scale the app much earlier.

At a company I worked, a single Golang instance (there was backup) was able to handle every single request by itself during peak hours, and do authentication, partial authorization, request enrichment, fraud detection, rate limiting and routing to the appropriate microservice. I'm not saying it was a good idea to have a custom Ingress/Proxy app but it's what we had.

By contrast, the mesh of Rails applications required a few hundred machines during peak time to serve the same number of requests, and none of it was CPU-heavy. It was DB heavy!

If it had been a Golang or JVM or Rust app it would require a much smaller fleet to serve.

[boredtofears]

> For instance you’re probably iterating over those six plans and inserting them individually in the DB. Another approach would’ve been to accumulate all of them in memory then build and perform a single query. That’s not something people really consider because it’s “micro” optimization and makes the code look worse.

This same pitfall exists in every language. This has nothing to do with Ruby.

[AlphaSite]

eh. Ruby makes it easy to do the wrong thing. imo.

[boredtofears]

Maybe, but this isn’t one of the ways it does.