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Comment by scottmf | Hacker News Reader

Also probably shouldn’t put RoR as the first item in your list of full-stack frameworks if your title says “at scale”

Having run a platform on RoR that did billions of requests per day, it scales just fine. It’s not as cost effective as Go, Java, Rust, etc., but it’s perfectly scaleable.

Scaling web apps horizontally invariably becomes more about where your data lives, how it gets scaled out, how it’s accessed, how work get processed (jobs), what caching you do, what memory requirements you have.... yada yada. Rails wasn’t ideal, but rarely are you ever working in a pristine “ideal” tech stack once you’ve hit scale and you’re 5 years into a business.

Lots of companies successfully use RoR at scale.

I think both statements depend on the definition of "at scale". I am no expert, but every RoR thing I have ever seen has been tiny in terms of traffic and still performed terribly. Is there anything in the top 100 sites using RoR?

GitHub? (although as far as I know they are moving partially away from it)

There's quite a distance between "tiny" and "top 100 sites"! Some pretty darn popular sites that use Rails (afaik) are GitHub, Shopify, Hulu, Twitch, and Airbnb.

Not really. The web has become massively centralized with almost all traffic going to a small number of sites. The bottom of the top 100 list is only getting about 50 million pageviews a month, even poorly written sites in slow languages can easily do that on very cheap low end hardware. Pretty much anything not in the top 100 is dealing with a tiny amount of traffic, even a fair bit of the top 100 is. So it is github and twitch, neither of which actually do anything substantial in RoR any more. That seems like a pretty good reason to think RoR's strength isn't high traffic volumes.

This is wrong. GitHub is still a large Rails app. See presentations by the core Rails team people who work there like Eileen Uchitelle and Aaron Patterson.

That's what I am going on. It literally says the RoR stuff is just the basic webpages, everything else has been re-written or was never RoR. Same deal as twitch, the RoR is just the trivial web portion which is mostly cached. All the chat and video is in go.

This may be true of Twitch but not GitHub. GitHub uses https://github.com/libgit2/rugged to bridge between Ruby and Git. As far as I'm aware, they still use Ruby to pull the diffs etc out of Git etc.

https://githubengineering.com/how-we-made-diff-pages-3x-fast... indicates they were still doing this as late as 2016.

YouTube, No. 2, was still running Python 2.7 as of last year. Python and Ruby are basically the same performance wise.

Instagram is also a Python app, AFAIK. Last year they contributed some memory efficiency improvements to CPython.

Shopify is likely the largest RoR site at 80k requests per second but since it's served as tons of different domains it doesn't really count.

Twitter was (originally) also built on RoR. Not to mention GitHub is a rails app.

It's also worth noting that Twitter's feature velocity fell off a cliff when they moved to Scala.

Oh interesting, I hadn't noticed that pattern.

I do think though there is a certain size companies like this reach where they go from innovative to being afraid to change anything lest the viral popularity goes away.

Stripe is also on Ruby. I think we should separate Ruby and Rails in performance comparison. Python and Ruby are definitely on the same scale.

>Shopify is likely the largest RoR site at 80k requests per second but since it's served as tons of different domains it doesn't really count.

And Different DB etc... Last time I said this I got massively downvoted for it. I think Github is possibly the largest RoR site out there.

GitHub, AirBnb, Bloomberg, Hulu, Basecamp, Goodreads, Groupon, SoundCloud, Kickstarter, ...

> including Django, Rails, and Laravel.

All dynamic languages.

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