After developing a large commercial website in Ruby my client is getting cold feet. They don't want to be the first big, commercial website out there using a RoR site. The company is an online sports betting company that will take several hundred thousand bets a day. Their concerns are mostly about performance.
Does anyone have any links to case studies or articles about large successful Ruby installs - or are they indeed going to be the first!
I'm not aware of any large companies which have explored RoR, the only project which I'm aware of is the Radiant CMS http://radiantcms.org/
Sorry I can't be more help than that
Gareth
Um, yellowpages.com is running Rails.
So are all of these: http://rubyonrails.org/applications
And there’s some here too: http://happycodr.com/
Oh and I should mention http://twitter.com as well.
revolutionhealth.com is a major organization with a robust product line all built on rails.
Thanks guys, Agile - are you involved in this site? It would be nice to know traffic numbers.
Yellowpages.com is interesting - I assume this is heavily used?
My clients are replacing an existing website and they have several hundred thousand users (they are one of the biggest sports gambling companies in Europe). If I can convince them to go with this one they have 6 subsidiaries around the world who will also take the framework. One of which is in asia and takes 1million bets a day!
In the earlier days of Twitter, I remember a number of up to 11,000 hits per second. Twitter became even more popular afterwards and they did have to overcome some scaling issues (which led to a few blog rants from the Twitter devs and DHH).
Rails is perfectly scalable, but expect the scaling to be less of a breeze than Rails programming itself. That said, there are so many performance improving measures you can take at each level of the application, Rails will scale. And the money you save by Rails’ extra productivity (i.e. less development time) can be spent on better hardware and network optimization and infrastructure.
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
CHOW.com (a CNET property) is on Rails, which serves hundreds of thousands of hits a day.
Penny Arcade is also on Rails, which while I don't have accurate traffic stats, I'm sure it's nuts.
eBay has a property running on Rails now. Yahoo! has a property running on Rails. LinkedIn is doing something with Rails now.
Others have mentioned the others I could think of. 
--Jeremy
FATdrive.tv is on Rails. We just launched recently and are having healthy growth. I look forward to the point when we have to scale up as it will be an interesting challenge.
-- Long http://FATdrive.tv/wall/trakb/10-Long http://FATdrive.tv/ - store, play, share
A few from the giants - http://mediacast.sun.com/ - https://mix.oracle.com/
Thanks guys - this is great stuff! Now we just have to wonder why our performance isn't as good as these examples indicate it should be!