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Slides for my RailsConf talk: "Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up"

By Jason Hoffman 18 May 07

Thank you all 200-300ish people that showed up for my talk this morning.

Here’s the slides.


  1. I did not attend, so I have a belated question about slide 75. The Force10 E300 appears to be a 132-port switch, not 48-port. And aren’t those things kinda expensive? Do they have some specific feature that you really like?

    I may have room in my budget this year to replace some circa 2001 BlackDiamonds, so I’m interested in such things.

    BTW, thanks for the info about $/Amp.

    — Wes Felter    461 days ago    #

  2. Jason, you never cease to amaze me at the amount of information you can uptake, and relate it to those of us who don’t have the luxury of your brain.

    Thanks for posting this up, it helps out a tremendous amount.

    — Robert Simplicio    461 days ago    #

  3. Can you say more on why Ruby should be process-based, for the benefit of those of us you didn’t see you talk?

    — Mark James Adams    461 days ago    #

  4. I imagine it’s because:

    1. Threads are hard to do right.
    2. Context switching between processes isn’t likely to be your bottleneck.

    But I’m not that smart. Someone else chime in please.

    — Joe Van Dyk    460 days ago    #

  5. Thanks for the talk. I have one comment, and one question.

    You are right to say that the app server may not be your bottleneck. It was very informative to be reminded of the dozens of other places you should look. But having eliminated all the others (and deciding you can’t afford Big IP:), what if the app server is your bottleneck? Is it conceivable that a Java solution may scale better than your Ruby solution? It is true that you can make anything perform if you have the time, money and inclination. But if you don’t, you may have to choose application software on the basis of performance. I could produce a more scalable web app on Java and Linux than VB.NET and Windows – but there are people in Redmond who could do the opposite! But could I produce a Rails solution on Linux which at least approaches the performance of the Java solution, all other things being equal? That is what I am trying to find out.

    The other thing is, you showed a really cool configuration trick where you had `hostname` backticked in a YAML file so hundreds of mongrels could read the same file. How do you get Ruby to understand the backticks? I tried `hostname` in database.yml and it didn’t work. Thanks for any information.

    — Rod McLaughlin    460 days ago    #

  6. Jason, I’m smiling.

    Glad to see the inner biologist is still lurking on slide 188.

    — Nick S    460 days ago    #

  7. Nice article.

    Question though. What are your thoughts on Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud and S3 storage services. They sound appealing from a scalability point of view.

    — R Lennox    458 days ago    #

  8. Great article Jason. Thanks for sharing

    — Iain Wright    456 days ago    #

  9. Hi Jason, its very very nice to see this amount of awesomely organized and useful data gathered and processed for us. You know, I’m an small fish alone in a fishbowl trying to learn and put the BlogBlogs up and running. Joyent is helping me a lot and our small talk on the phone is now driving my next steps. I hope than one day I can star worrying about some of the problems you presented nice solutions on your presentation.
    Thanks for sharing!!!

    — Manoel Lemos    455 days ago    #

  10. Jason, thanks for the great talk. I have been trying to locate my written notes but have since moved office….

    During the Q & A at the end, you mentioned the best OS in your experience for running a single server. I think you mentioned FreeBSD. Can you please confirm? And what version? Thanks for any information.

    — Andy Mayer    254 days ago    #

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