[sudhirj]

For a 100k, they could have

1) Bought a ton of Heroku dynos with every single addon enabled. That would have given them any version of Rails they wanted with Ruby 1.8, 1.9 or even 2.0; Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, two different kinds of Memcache and three different kinds of asynchronous processing.

2) Gotten fully managed servers at Rackspace with pro support for pretty much any setup they wanted.

How is this even possible? The same application happens to hit bugs in the Ubuntu kernel and Rails core that haven't been fixed all the way to 3.2.9? And they have 100k to spend but couldn't be bothered to try different kernels and distros? Really? Have they seen the AMI launch screen on EC2?

[bibinou]

3) hired two $5000/mo sysadmins for a year.

[ahoyhere]

I shared your comment with people who actually hire for technical positions, and we all had a good laugh.

[ahoyhere]

We had Rails Core team members spend lots of time trying to fix our Rails 3.x slowdowns. As you probably know, Thomas is a Rails Core Alumnus and we have lots of personal connections in the Rails community.

Nobody could identify it.

Our sysadmin was a sysadmin for one of the first, biggest, and most reliable Rails app ecosystems. He couldn't trace the Ubuntu issue.

It sounds like you don't have a lot of experience running a business. When you do, you will realize that just throwing money at problems doesn't solve anything.

PS - We have servers at Rackspace. 3 of them. Where do you think a lot of that money went? They're $3k a month. And guess what — they won't manage servers with the configuration we required. Fab.