Live data from Hacker News

RoR vs. What else?

news.ycombinator.com

11–18 of 18 posts

Re: RoR vs. What else?

#11
Replace MySQL with Percona XtraDB, and leverage aggressive "permacaching" for a start. Then it's more about splitting up your infrastructure and having mechanisms for dealing with increased load on different parts of it (ie high db load = spin up more DB machines)

Re: RoR vs. What else?

#12

[edit - one additional point which is probably more important than the rest. if you've already done one rewrite and you're thinking of another, your problem is you probably don't know how to move the ball down the field in a business sense so you're picking up the only hammer you have - technology choice, and repeatedly swinging it. Take a step back, ask yourself if the problem is fear of the unknown, and attack the…

Seconding that.

PHP doesn't scale. Java doesn't scale. Python doesn't scale.

If you wait for something that "scales", you'll never ship anything.

Scaling isn't done automatically, it's something that's applied to a problem. If MySQL doesn't scale, and it has proven itself to be very capable in a wide variety of circumstances, then what does?

The more you read about scaling, the more you realize there's no magic bullet, no magically scalable language or platform or framework. It's all about careful investigation of the nature of the problems, the bottlenecks, and developing solutions to address those.

Re: RoR vs. What else?

#13

Use a different stack for machine learning, and switch over to postgres - I'm fairly sure it'll scale better than mySQL

MySQL is as capable as Postgres and can be tuned just as fast. The differences between these two are features, not performance.

Re: RoR vs. What else?

#14

Replace MySQL with Percona XtraDB, and leverage aggressive "permacaching" for a start. Then it's more about splitting up your infrastructure and having mechanisms for dealing with increased load on different parts of it (ie high db load = spin up more DB machines)

You have no idea what the problem is and you're already advocating a change of platform? This is not how you scale. This is how you hit up a client for thousands of hours of "consulting" fees.

This performance problem could be because of missing indexes, grossly inefficient queries, or a whole host of other elementary problems that can be fixed with a keystroke.

Re: RoR vs. What else?

#15
------ Much appreciate the insights. We are actually less worried about scale now (We just got users and some revenue and we are a long shot away from scale problems). We did not want to go too far down the path where we carry tech debt so much that we have to re-do. Your answers tell that its okay to go the way we are going and there are still ways to keep the recommendations (Machine Learning part) separate. ---

I shall get back here to post a link to our product in about a week when we launch. Would very much appreciate comments then!

Re: RoR vs. What else?

#16

Use a different stack for machine learning, and switch over to postgres - I'm fairly sure it'll scale better than mySQL

MySQL is as capable as Postgres and can be tuned just as fast. The differences between these two are features, not performance.

Hm, didn't know that, thanks!

Re: RoR vs. What else?

#17

Replace MySQL with Percona XtraDB, and leverage aggressive "permacaching" for a start. Then it's more about splitting up your infrastructure and having mechanisms for dealing with increased load on different parts of it (ie high db load = spin up more DB machines)

You have no idea what the problem is and you're already advocating a change of platform? This is not how you scale. This is how you hit up a client for thousands of hours of "consulting" fees. This performance problem could be because of missing indexes, grossly inefficient queries, or a whole host of other elementary problems that can be fixed with a keystroke.

Not advocating a change of platform at all - Percona is a drop-in replacement for MySQL, and XtraDB is backwards compatible with InnoDB which gets much more performance out of multicore systems. Unless your server has one core, it's a no-brainer.

Re: RoR vs. What else?

#18
post #3

Your web stack and your machine learning stack don't have to be the same. http://scikit-learn.org/ is Python and very popular for machine learning. Here is a in depth training video http://pyvideo.org/video/972/tutorial-scikit-learn-machine-l...

Do you know any serious framework for image processing written in python?
Post reply on HN