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What this says to me, a non-RoR user, is that it's harder to build websites with Java than with RoR, but if you pass a certain (very unusual) level of traffic, you'll wish you'd made the extra effort; otherwise, you'll be glad you didn't. (Extra effort isn't free.) If you get to the scale of twitter, and more importantly if you have written a real time messaging server with a web application framework, it doesn't matter which framework or language you started with as you're going to be completely rewriting your entire stack at some stage as different parts fail in order to deal with the load (unless you have an incredibly experienced team who has written a twitter equivalent before and scaled it to 15000 messages a second). There's no difference between ruby or python (or perl, or php) in that regard - they are all interpreted and relatively slow, which starts to matter at this scale. And also even if you had used java or c in the fist place, if you had an architecture not written with massive scale in mind, you probably wouldn't survive that growth without radical changes on every level of your stack. Re ruby versus python, the popularity of rails is partly historical accident, partly that ruby is a nice language which doesn't get in the way and is ideally suited to this domain, and partly that rails is deals with lots of the basics of web development for you without getting in the way too much when you need to adapt it. None of that means ruby is better than python, but I'd disagree that people put up with ruby in order to use rails - it's a really nice language in its own right, but it is not highly performant (though it is getting better). For most websites of course, many of which can employ caching, that is a non-issue, even at large scale - witness the success of Wordpress in php which would not survive even modest loads without caching. |
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/gc-tuning-6-14...