[kenkam]

tl;dr OP throws 3 libs together, wrote a few scripts, made a few measurements. Look, it can handle 1 million connections.

I like what he has done but don't know why it made HN frontpage. I'm guessing it's because it has Ruby, 1 million, and concurrent in the title.

Not bashing the author, it's good work in its own right. I'm trying to understand how stuff like this makes frontpage HN. Where's the value of this article? That Ruby can handle 1 mil connections? Am I missing something (even if it's obvious?)

I think someone mentioned better real world test cases. I agree that would be a place to start. Perhaps he could send more meaningful data to clients. Maybe market data for some stocks or something. '\0' is not very useful after all!

[mmahemoff]

There's a lot of Ruby developers on HN and many of them are interested to know how it can scale.

Benchmarking experiments of this nature are actually remarkable because they are so rarely done. Most scaling and performance principles still arise from conjecture. It's not trivial to set up a test like this.

Also, _this_ is the place to start in preparation for a real world test. The next iteration, maybe a more realistic test, is only a fork away.

[kenkam]

Your forking argument won me over. Very good point.

[agentultra]

I'm not a genius Ruby hacker by any stretch but if EventMachine is like any other "async IO framework" in other scripting languages then it is built on libev or libevent... so Ruby isn't really handling the connections, it's handling the callbacks. Pedantic, but important to note.

[saraid216]

> Pedantic, but important to note.

Pedantic, but "pedantic" actually idiomatically means "not important to note".

[agentultra]

In what culture?

In my dictionary it's "of or like a pedant"; a pedant being someone who is overly concerned with minor details.

Still... noted!

[saraid216]

If the detail is minor, it's not important.

[FooBarWidget]

EventMachine does not build upon libev or libevent. It implements all that stuff by itself.