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Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]

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Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]

#31

Post by kennystone »

cageface wrote: post #8
angerman wrote: post #5

One thing that wasn't touched was JRuby[1], on their site they state high performance and real threading as advantages. If twitter has (some of) the best ruby developer (mentioned somewhere at the end of the video), why have they neglected JRuby? Why is it no option? For legacy code with native extensions this makes sense. But is jruby slower, more memory hungry on the JVM then scala or clojure? I always though that…

JRuby is fast for a Ruby implementation, but it's still far, far slower than Scala or Java itself. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

A lot of the pain a site like Twitter will have comes from GC (they wrote their own Ruby GC), and JRuby has a much better garbage collector over MRI and probably better than Twitter's.

Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]

#32

Post by JoelMcCracken »

imack wrote: post #25
xal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopify is still 100% ROR and we serve hundreds of millions of requests. You will be fine :-) It's a competitive advantage for us, we move faster then the rest of the market.

I'm actually really glad to hear it. Though, I wonder about the "rails doesn't scale" mantra, is that really more for active record? In your experience is active record the biggest out of the box bottleneck?

That seems to be the case. The view/controller layers can be scaled via more machines. Its the database layer that requires synchronization. Thats a universal problem, though.

Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]

#33

Post by cppsnob »

netghost wrote: post #15
bad_user wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do get that a dynamic language like Ruby will always be slower than a language like Java, which has primitives and where many things, including static method calls, are solved at compile time. But citing the Alioth.Debian benchmarks? Really? Dude, take a look at the source-code of those benchmarks sometimes -- they are completely useless ;)

If you want a fast dynamic language, take a look at Lua. It's surprisingly fast, especially LuaJIT, and pretty straight forward (almost boring really). The main downside is that there isn't the breadth of community around it.

Lua's threading is just as broken as Python or Ruby. Maybe even more so.

Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]

#37

Post by igouy »

bad_user wrote: post #14
cageface wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JRuby is fast for a Ruby implementation, but it's still far, far slower than Scala or Java itself. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

I do get that a dynamic language like Ruby will always be slower than a language like Java, which has primitives and where many things, including static method calls, are solved at compile time. But citing the Alioth.Debian benchmarks? Really? Dude, take a look at the source-code of those benchmarks sometimes -- they are completely useless ;)

Dude, "completely useless" is just "completely useless" name calling.

Say what you think is wrong with the source-code of particular programs.

Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]

#38

Post by lionheart »

xal wrote: post #16
rrrazdan wrote: post #13

I was recently in a quandary over the choice of technology. I started RoR and I really like it. However I was concerned about long term implications of that choice. The thing that I am taking from this talk is that I shouldn't worry about that, right now. If and when I need to scale, I will have enough resources to make a better choice. Resources that I don't have right now.

Shopify is still 100% ROR and we serve hundreds of millions of requests. You will be fine :-) It's a competitive advantage for us, we move faster then the rest of the market.

Well, correct me if I'm wring but Shopfiy is a completely different scaling problem from Twitter. As I understand it Shopify's individual hosted stores are pretty much self-contained. So you can pretty much stick each one on it's own server with it's own database and it'll be fine. Twitter accounts all have to be able to talk to eachother in real time so you can't do that.

My current startup has a Shopify-like architecture which is what I'm counting on to help me if I ever need to scale fast.

So I think the first question you have to ask yourself when considering scaling is: what is my architecture like?

Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]

#39

Post by lucisferre »

rrrazdan wrote: post #13

I was recently in a quandary over the choice of technology. I started RoR and I really like it. However I was concerned about long term implications of that choice. The thing that I am taking from this talk is that I shouldn't worry about that, right now. If and when I need to scale, I will have enough resources to make a better choice. Resources that I don't have right now.

Excellent. This is exactly what all developers need to realize about technology choices. Make decisions based on what will help you to deliver value quickly now, you won't really know what needs, or how it needs, to scale untill much later anyways.
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