Hacker News Reader

Comment by calloc | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of experience with the framework. Plenty of experience with Ruby. The scalability issues I was talking about were seen at a fortune 500 company where a Rails app was used for an internal only application.

The major issues with scaling was that Ruby in general is absolutely horrible in managing memory, and was constantly having to be restarted. We ended up replacing the app with one built on top of Java which instead of requiring 6 servers with load balancer in front of it, to just 2 servers, one for the front-end and one for the backend. Java served the needs much better, faster, and didn't require the same amount of administration to constantly make sure that everything is still running properly.

Could the same have been done with Rails? Maybe. Are we happier with the Java based solution, its stability and speed? Yes absolutely.

View on HN

Java's certainly a more efficient language than Ruby, so it makes sense that you can use fewer machines to do the same thing. The question is always: what's that cost in developer time? Rails is very quick to develop with.

What Java framework did you use, out of curiosity?

Incidentally, I'd be curious to hear about anyone's experience with Scala/Lift - if it's actually as efficient as straight-up Java, and how quick it is to develop stuff with.

I am not at liberty to disclose the technology used unfortunately, otherwise I would have given more information in my previous post.

While rails may be quick to develop with and may be great for prototypes it is not something that is ready for the prime time. The cost to get up to speed in Java was negligible compared to the end result, in that we are now able to have less time spent trying to debug problems because of Ruby not functioning correctly or having to be restarted (we had several tasks that took some database crunching in which ruby would sometimes fall over, or just take up all of the available memory thereby starving other processes and eventually being killed by the oom killer leaving parts of our database in an inconsistent state).

> not something that is ready for the prime time.

Which is of course, to use the technical term, "bullshit" :-)

There are a lot of statements that you could make that would be fair, like "Java is more mature", or "we have a lot of Java expertise, so it was much easier for us to debug it" or "for our particular needs, Rails simply wasn't suitable", but to say it's "not ready for prime time" is to deny the reality that it is used extensively in "prime time".

"it is not something that is ready for the prime time."

Thats why millions of users are using hundreds of large scale web apps right now built on Rails and/or Ruby (ie: Github, Slideshare, Hulu, Justin.tv, Basecamp, Alice.com ...the list goes on and on http://rails100.pbworks.com/Alexa+Rankings).

Right...

Might want to do some homework before making such a statement. True Ruby has memory issues. Running Ruby enterprise edition by passenger helped us a ton. Typically memory issues have to do with poorly written ruby more than anything...which rails makes it easy to do....like Product.all.each type stuff ... stupid example

Reply on news.ycombinator.com