21–30 of 109 posts
If rails causes a kernel panic then this is really a bug in the kernel. No user land app should ever do this. Why not try to scale on *BSD or Windows all of whom have different kernel and scale just fine? $100,000 and no one said "hey what about running it on "?
Does this make sense? They don't mention trying to get support from Engine Yard on hosting their app on Rails without kernel panics, or trying a managed solution such as Heroku, or trying other OSs other than Ubuntu such as CentOS or something from Joyent. Just trying with the best possible syadmin they could hire and "Rails Core members". Anyway, kudos for not submitting their users to a service they're not confiden…
You probably noticed Charm had some nasty downtime a couple weeks ago.
Service quality is very important to us. If we didn't think we could do better, we wouldn't do it at all.
We've spent very generously on sysadmin services and infrastructure (nearly $100k of investment on sysadmin services/infrastructure alone). We hired the best possible, and we splurged on a redundant, powerful, and expensive server configuration from the beginning.
Now we've discovered that there's some kind of base incompatibility with Ubuntu, which is giving us kernel panics which nobody can track down. Charm has been plagued by mystery technical problems from the beginning, when we had to backport from Rails 3.x to 2.x because of massive performance slowdowns which even Rails Core members couldn't identify.
What this has really shown us is that, if we open Charm to the general public, we won't be able to provide you with the kind of service you deserve. We are a tiny team, and so far, we've had zero luck in our attempts to grow by hiring developers. Problems which are small now will only get bigger.
There are a lot of things I'm willing to take risks with, but not with your ability to provide support to customers for your business.
And so it is with a very heavy heart that we will cease operating Charm from Dec 15, for the foreseeable future.
You won't be billed again, and we'll refund your last payments.
We will gladly help you migrate your data out of Charm. Please contact us directly (support@charmhq.com) for help.
Thank you so much for taking a chance on us, and sharing our dream for a superior email interface.
I'm truly sorry to disappoint you.
Best wishes,
Amy
Found this so far: http://charmhq.com/Charm_Bootcamp.pdf
If rails causes a kernel panic then this is really a bug in the kernel. No user land app should ever do this. Why not try to scale on *BSD or Windows all of whom have different kernel and scale just fine? $100,000 and no one said "hey what about running it on "?
It's quite fascinating really, especially in 2012 to give up because of software failure.
They seem to be over their limit with Github, pasted below as a mirror: You probably noticed Charm had some nasty downtime a couple weeks ago. Service quality is very important to us. If we didn't think we could do better, we wouldn't do it at all. We've spent very generously on sysadmin services and infrastructure (nearly $100k of investment on sysadmin services/infrastructure alone). We hired the best possible, and…
Does this make sense? They don't mention trying to get support from Engine Yard on hosting their app on Rails without kernel panics, or trying a managed solution such as Heroku, or trying other OSs other than Ubuntu such as CentOS or something from Joyent. Just trying with the best possible syadmin they could hire and "Rails Core members". Anyway, kudos for not submitting their users to a service they're not confiden…
Or even just Debian. I ran into issues (years ago) with Ubuntu stability due to closed source drivers on a laptop; sure, I have the skills to debug that sort of thing, but why waste my time? I had been running Debian just fine on desktops and servers for years, and after switching the laptop to it, the lockups stopped.
I'm more than willing to admit there may be real technical issues they ran into, but it sounds to me like they gave up too easy, and we may never know what the problems are. Would've been nice to at least have seen a bug report (honestly don't know if they submitted any, but I'm willing to bet they didn't).
If rails causes a kernel panic then this is really a bug in the kernel. No user land app should ever do this. Why not try to scale on *BSD or Windows all of whom have different kernel and scale just fine? $100,000 and no one said "hey what about running it on "?
We moved to debian after numerous problems and have had no issues since.
My business runs on Ubuntu/Rails just fine. Maybe if they were a bit more familiar with Linux they would have done better, or at least have saved some money figuring out what went wrong: https://twitter.com/amyhoy/statuses/189072763590418432
Sounds to me they would rather blame Ubuntu than their inability to fix the issue.
Later edit: to elaborate that last point. I'm not saying Ubuntu is not at fault, but rather that problem solving goes with the territory. Given the wide array of alternatives, this was not the sort of thing you could openly complain about.