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

By: Andy Mayer

Andy Mayer — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 03:05:43 +0000

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.

By: Manoel Lemos

Manoel Lemos — Thu, 24 May 2007 00:57:05 +0000

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!!!

By: Iain Wright

Iain Wright — Tue, 22 May 2007 21:11:52 +0000

Great article Jason. Thanks for sharing

By: R Lennox

R Lennox — Mon, 21 May 2007 06:16:04 +0000

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.

By: Nick S

Nick S — Sat, 19 May 2007 02:41:18 +0000

Jason, I’m smiling.

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

By: Rod McLaughlin

Rod McLaughlin — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:57:18 +0000

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.

By: Joe Van Dyk

Joe Van Dyk — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:17:44 +0000

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.

By: Mark James Adams

Mark James Adams — Fri, 18 May 2007 11:50:23 +0000

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

By: Robert Simplicio

Robert Simplicio — Fri, 18 May 2007 09:43:01 +0000

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.

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Fri, 18 May 2007 08:42:48 +0000

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.