Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, it can be used.

Yes, it is crazy inefficient.

At Wunderlist, we launched WL3 with something like 1K rails boxes on AWS, running a few services. During the launch, my fun was tracking when we reached user/box parity :-)

But it did work.

After a while, we replaced each of the hundred+ rails boxes per service with 2 Scala instances per service.

Also worked. No change for users.

The FP folks should be forever grateful to Ruby for making their languages seem fast in comparison.

At another company where I consulted, for a web content management system, the rails devs were super excited to get the performance up to slightly below one second per request.

We got much better than that 2 decades earlier, running a CGI-Bin (no fast-cgi, so complete restart on every request) that completely re-initalised its Oracle DB connection every time etc. On hardware that was a small fraction of the performance of today's boxes.

> the rails devs were super excited to get the performance up to slightly below one second per request

If that was the case then Rails was their least important problem.

At the prototyping stage back-and-forth with the client I write VERY rudimentary Rails code, n+1s be damned, but I don't remember ever seeing a second long request.

I guess it just depends on what your app does. At my previous job we were serving several million requests/day off about 15-20 rails instances on heroku

It is a giant red flag to hear someone talk about requests per day. A day has 86,400 seconds. If you had 3 million requests in a day, that's only 35 per second on average.

If you had 20 instances, that is under 2 requests per second per instance.

I don't know what each request does of course, but it might be worth asking if each one should really take a billion clock cycles to complete.

I don't know why the parent was downvoted. His point is valid - 2rps per instance is pretty damning.

At previous job, we ran a rails based 60M€/year photos album e-commerce with 6 backend devs and a dedicated servers fleet on 2 DC that costed less than one dev salary.

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