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Nothing wrong with Rails, especially if the team knows it well. Time to develop is the real cost in software most of the time.

If Github wanted to integrate a lot of real-time features, then Elixir + Phoenix can't be beat. Depending on what they replace, a 10x in performance and a fraction of the servers needed is a nice win.

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I've seen performance boosts closer to 20x when I've helped companies rewrite their Rails products in Elixir. I've also seen a reduction in server costs. In all fairness though, simply rewriting the Rails app in Rails, with the benefit of hindsight, probably would have resulted in a performance gain too.

I would bet $10 the scaling problem with Github would properly have more to deal with Git than Rails itself. Switching to Elixir wouldn't really help.

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