<p>There's a joke in the Ruby and Rails world that says 'Rails doesn't scale', which it's just a joke to really say: what is scallable is the way you create your app, and that does not depend whether is written in Rails, Perl or even <a href="http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialCgiShellScript.html">Bash</a>.</p> <p>So it's important to know what matters in terms of building a scallable web app. As you know:</p> <p><b>Scalability</b>: ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged.</p> <p>And how do you accomplish that in Ruby/Rails/whatever app you're writing?</p> <p>Well, one way to gain further knowledge on the subject is by reading this article. The author explains what is envolved when you need to scale a microblogging service such as Twitter. The author created Nouncer (a developer platform for building microblogs and similar services) and ended up learning quite a lot about the inner-workings and challenges of such an application.</p> <p>Please do read it, it's a series of 3 articles:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi.html">Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/scaling-a-micro.html">Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part II</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/04/scaling-a-micro.html">Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part III</a></li> </ul> <p>My thoughts? Scalling is not a solved subject, and it depends on the expertise of the developer/architect on finding ways to identify the fine grained causes for bottlenecks and to deal with them in a rather creative way, cycling between endless monitoring and improvements down the road.</p> <p>Fun, isn't? :)</p> 152 2008-12-19T11:34:36Z 12 2009-05-03T21:58:08Z