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Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#151

Post by mgkimsal »

knowtheory wrote: post #39
SiVal wrote: post #32

What this says to me, a non-RoR user, is that it's harder to build websites with Java than with RoR, but if you pass a certain (very unusual) level of traffic, you'll wish you'd made the extra effort; otherwise, you'll be glad you didn't. (Extra effort isn't free.) Fine, but what I wish I understood was why RoR is so popular to begin with. The claim is always that Rails is so wonderful that it's worth learning Ruby j…

Python has a roughly equivalent MVC web framework called Django. Ruby and Python as languages are not radically different in kind, but their respective developer communities have had different focuses, and as a consequence the library of tools are not identical. Ruby on Rails became popular because people were dissatisfied with the way that web development was being done, and DHH is very good at marketing/propaganda.…

I'll throw out another factor:

When Rails was introduced, there were no other substantive Ruby web frameworks - Ruby itself was relatively obscure compared to every other web-capable tech. As such, it (Rails) had no competition in the framework space. PHP, Java, Python and other languages all had competing web frameworks to choose from.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#153

Post by vidarh »

timothya wrote: post #8

It's interesting that when it comes time to scale to serve enormous loads, you have to be willing to change fundamental parts of your stack which you've made a huge investment in. Ruby holds up well enough on the majority of the sites that use it, but when you have traffic the size that Twitter does, it's just not good enough. And it turns out that Java provides a nice tradeoff with high performance and high-level co…

No, you don't need to change fundamental parts. You need to get the architecture right. Then you need to determine whether the potential cost savings of switching languages are worth it for you. If things start falling over when you scale, it's an architecture problem, not a language problem.

Why do I say that? Because in Twitters case, handling tweets is a "trivial" problem to parallelise, and the potential savings of switching language will be a rounding error in terms of scaling their system compared to getting the architecture right.

(To scale Twitter: Make trees. Split the following list into suitably wide trees, and your problem has now been reduced to an efficient hierarchical data store + efficiently routing messages. Both are well understood, easy to scale "solved" problems)

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#154

Post by vidarh »

Skoofoo wrote: post #72
SiVal wrote: post #32

What this says to me, a non-RoR user, is that it's harder to build websites with Java than with RoR, but if you pass a certain (very unusual) level of traffic, you'll wish you'd made the extra effort; otherwise, you'll be glad you didn't. (Extra effort isn't free.) Fine, but what I wish I understood was why RoR is so popular to begin with. The claim is always that Rails is so wonderful that it's worth learning Ruby j…

Python's culture heavily encourages explicit, consistent code while Ruby's culture is a lot more flexible in that respect. Rails makes many assumptions by default and has an API that is based on clever coding for the sake of maximizing productivity. That stuff would likely not fly in the Python community.

There are some of us Ruby users that find the Rails approach absolutely disgusting... I don't believe it maximize productivity either - the moment you need to deviate too much from the defaults you quickly descend into hell, trying to figure out what "magic" is happening behind your back.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#155

Post by rimantas »

thebluesky wrote: post #144
jrockway wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers are easier (though perhaps less fun) to make than humans. Ruby is slow but it's close enough to Java that the numbers will still work out. Humans: probably not.

30x slower seems a bit of a stretch for "close enough": http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

You should look at performance difference in relevant operations. I doubt that they calculate mandelbrots at twitter.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#156

Post by rjzzleep »

timothya wrote: post #8

It's interesting that when it comes time to scale to serve enormous loads, you have to be willing to change fundamental parts of your stack which you've made a huge investment in. Ruby holds up well enough on the majority of the sites that use it, but when you have traffic the size that Twitter does, it's just not good enough. And it turns out that Java provides a nice tradeoff with high performance and high-level co…

it's funny that this is even an issue anymore. at the time where twitter was started, the ruby vm has huge issues, and you couldn't even do evented io.

what I find even funnier is that people just throw in play and grails without a little of experience in rails. The eco system is entirely different:

- you can use java and therefore java libraries(yes you could do the same in jruby, but nvm) - bundles/gems are an order of magnitude better than classical java dependency hell. - need something in rails? add a gem. need something in grails? search throw the outdated plugins, search for missing documentation(just take a look at stackoverflow). in general -> write it yourself or pay a consultant to do it. - have a question? fight with incomplete documentation.

on top of that grails is just a stack on top of the spring mvc.

what about play? i like play more than I like grails tbh, because it doesn't want to be the rails of java. yes people compare it to one another, but that's just the familiarity effect.

now, where's the computationally intensive stuff? nowhere to be found. it's a web api. where's the computationally intensive stuff in twitter? I don't know, but chances are theres a native extension for that nowadays.

There actually was a time when you simply could not build a scalable system in ruby without too many hoops, but that's no longer the case. Yes the GIL is bad, but keep in mind that things like ruby fibers didn't even exist at the time.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#157

Post by jacques_chester »

jakejake wrote: post #113

I would think that scaling the web servers to handle 15k requests per second would be relatively easy compared to scaling the database servers. I would have thought that you could just throw cheap hardware at that problem, whereas the database would be a considerably complex scaling issue.

Not to trivialise your question, because scaling to tens of thousands of database TPS transactions is difficult.

But it is commercially solved. If you turn up with a fistful of money, Oracle, IBM, Sybase and a bunch of other companies would love to handle that for you.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#158

Post by jacques_chester »

camus wrote: post #97
elchief wrote: post #3

JVM is a wonderful thing.

Github and the thousands of Rails powered websites have no problem scaling, so i'm pretty sure neither Ruby nor Rails are a problem.

Github is an easier problem: generate pages.

Twitter has to deal with very high fanout and low cacheability.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#159

Post by thebluesky »

rimantas wrote: post #155
thebluesky wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30x slower seems a bit of a stretch for "close enough": http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

You should look at performance difference in relevant operations. I doubt that they calculate mandelbrots at twitter.

> You should look at performance difference in relevant operations

If you have a link to a Twitter-realistic benchmark I'd be interested see the results.

Re: Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-JVM move

#160

Post by irahul »

rjzzleep wrote: post #156
timothya wrote: post #8

It's interesting that when it comes time to scale to serve enormous loads, you have to be willing to change fundamental parts of your stack which you've made a huge investment in. Ruby holds up well enough on the majority of the sites that use it, but when you have traffic the size that Twitter does, it's just not good enough. And it turns out that Java provides a nice tradeoff with high performance and high-level co…

it's funny that this is even an issue anymore. at the time where twitter was started, the ruby vm has huge issues, and you couldn't even do evented io. what I find even funnier is that people just throw in play and grails without a little of experience in rails. The eco system is entirely different: - you can use java and therefore java libraries(yes you could do the same in jruby, but nvm) - bundles/gems are an orde…

> i like play more than I like grails tbh, because it doesn't want to be the rails of java. yes people compare it to one another, but that's just the familiarity effect.

My memory might be playing tricks on me, but I remember play developers talking about rails being a huge influence.

If Play isn't rails for Java, how else one does a Rails for Java? The "familiarity effect" is there because Play is modeled after Rails.

> now, where's the computationally intensive stuff? nowhere to be found. it's a web api. where's the computationally intensive stuff in twitter? I don't know, but chances are theres a native extension for that nowadays.

Search, for one is computationally intensive. I am pretty sure there are more which the outside world doesn't know about.

> There actually was a time when you simply could not build a scalable system in ruby without too many hoops,

What scale are we talking about? At Twitter scale, ruby or anything else has to jump hoops. For example, network load from users coming online and offline on FB chat will break out of box solutions.

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