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I think you answered the question. You scale Rails by slowly replacing it. The problem with their architecture is that they hadn't done that yet. Node is handling their web scale traffic as-is.

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Maybe I didn't make myself clear. My point was that their Rails implementation may not be well written, i.e., not architect-ed properly since beginning. You cannot simply throw a few tables and scaffolds and hope it scale. That way may work for small apps, definitely not for web-scale apps like this.

To be fair, Node.js also has its own quirks, besides the callback maintenance issues, I also mentioned in another post that Node.js is not as scalable as a lot of people present it to be.

Comparing rails and nodejs isn't really a fair fight. Rails has a ton of shiny bits that bare node simply doesn't. Comparing the two on speed alone isn't going to be overly productive.

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