Hacker News Reader

Comment by phaedryx | Hacker News Reader

Twitter was Rails' worst advertisement. They used Rails as a scapegoat to hide their bad tech. I still hear things like "Rails can't scale; remember Twitter?"

View on HN

I had the same thought when I read this. I wasn't into Rails back then (or development) so I don't have a sense of context for what the framework was like at that point in time, but the more articles I read about Twitter in the early days, the more of a sense I get that maybe they didn't write the best code.

But Rails is nice to work with and whispers 99% of websites will never need to reach Twitter-scale.

At least 3 large companies I know my friends developers work at, over the last 5 years switched from Rails to PHP. All told me same story "after twitter, noone wants to work or touch rails anymore"

Meanwhile all 3 large companies probably host their code on Github :-)

And even if they don’t, many if not most of their dependencies do.

What will they do when they find out phpBB and WordPress are written in PHP?

Airbnb is still on rails.. Probably the largest rails app out there for now.

Except that I'd bet Airbnb's read qps requirement is less than 1% of Twitter's. Write qps would be even smaller.

True, but on an absolute scale AirBNB is still very big.

By RPS, I imagined Shopify is largest. But then from what I understand, Shopify operate in such a way that every shop is its own app. i.e there is 100s of thousands of Basecamp / AirBnb running on the same code base and every shop is somewhat isolated.

Purely in terms of App in think the largest would be Cookpad. AirBnB never shared their numbers so I don't know.

https://speakerdeck.com/a_matsuda/the-recipe-for-the-worlds-...

I don't think so. Seriously think about it. How many active users does AirBnB have? How many put their home up for rent, and how many rent in a year? I reckon you get more tweets in a day than AirBnB rentals in a year. That's how big Twitter is or small AirBnB is. :D

Twitter was bigger but they don’t run on Rails anymore where I gather AirBNB does.

I would imagine Shopify on Black Friday is under heavier load.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com