Wow... The amount of hardware required for that application is just horrifying...
I'm really not sure what to think of this. I know Ruby isn't a speed demon, but 25 servers to serve up a few hundred images per second is just insane. These articles about scaling Ruby/Rails apps remind me a bit of those old Java/EJB/SuperEnterpriseEdition/TimeSink hello world examples that took 80+ lines of code... only with hardware.
I'm not a big Ruby fan, but I have a hard time believing that this is representative of the experience one could expect to have scaling a Ruby application. Can anyone here share some personal experience? All that seems to be out there is the typical Twitter bashing kind of stuff.
They're not just serving up images - hundreds of thousands of images are being uploaded daily and millions more are being sent to different users every day.
It's not like a blog or digg, or even YouTube where you can just serve up static files for the most part. Social applications tend to be extremely write-heavy and every request ends up hitting the full Rails stack.
I'm really not sure what to think of this. I know Ruby isn't a speed demon, but 25 servers to serve up a few hundred images per second is just insane. These articles about scaling Ruby/Rails apps remind me a bit of those old Java/EJB/SuperEnterpriseEdition/TimeSink hello world examples that took 80+ lines of code... only with hardware.
I'm not a big Ruby fan, but I have a hard time believing that this is representative of the experience one could expect to have scaling a Ruby application. Can anyone here share some personal experience? All that seems to be out there is the typical Twitter bashing kind of stuff.
By the way, I think this is the article the blog refers to: http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/2008/06/web-scalability.html