ROR performance for milions pageviews/month

rubyonrails-talk
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Hi all!

  I`ll rewrite a 10 years old site, written in asp/mysql (www.motonline.com.br). Now it has one milion page views a month, and we can hope it grows after rewrite. Well, I know several ror sites, but have no idea about its access stats. I already use ror for smaller projects and only need to confirm if ror can satisfy the performance demands for this.   Can you comment about the ror performance for such a page view scale and/or point to some cases or statistics from existing sites?

Thank you, Tom Lobato

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Twitter has more than this, therefore its possible.

Blog: http://random8.zenunit.com/ Learn rails: http://sensei.zenunit.com/

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I`ll rewrite a 10 years old site, written in asp/mysql (www.motonline.com.br). Now it has one milion page views a month, and we can hope it grows after rewrite. Well, I know several ror sites, but have no idea about its access stats. I already use ror for smaller projects and only need to confirm if ror can satisfy the performance demands for this. Can you comment about the ror performance for such a page view scale and/or point to some cases or statistics from existing sites?

Rails can scale to support that. The problems you'll run into after a certain point aren't really Rails specific, but will apply to any site serving that amount of traffic.

Also keep in mind that 1mil views/month spread out evenly is only .38 views a second. Which isn't much. Of course traffic is never spread evenly, but you get my point.

You might want to check out http://railslab.newrelic.com/scaling-rails to help guide your decisions.

-philip

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Julian Leviston wrote:

Twitter has more than this, therefore its possible.

That's a horrible example. Twitter is notorious for poor performance and frequent outages.

However, GitHub and Lighthouse are good examples of high-traffic Rails apps with good performance. So is Backpack, I think. So it certainly is possible.

Best,

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Julian Leviston wrote:

Twitter has more than this, therefore its possible.

That's a horrible example. Twitter is notorious for poor performance and frequent outages.

However, GitHub and Lighthouse are good examples of high-traffic Rails apps with good performance. So is Backpack, I think. So it certainly is possible.

cardplayer.com and spadeclub.com also run Rails. There's a ton of stuff going on much of which isn't cacheable (at least for cardplayer.com). 3 years ago cardplayer did about 8 mil views a day for a couple of weeks (during the WSOP). There's some hardware behind it, but we'd have done that with any other platform as well.

also, doesn't penny-arcade run rails? they do a ton of traffic.

-philip

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Tom,

Check Joyent's article on LinkedIn scaling (Scale Rails to 1 Billion Pageviews):

http://www.joyent.com/a/scale-rails-to-1-billion-pageviews

Also, we're currently revamping a couple very large sites using rails, so we're quite confident on its performance. (vc tá em SP?)

Cheers, Sazima

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What would happen if you put an iFrame on the current site that requests a response from a rails test app? It could be invisible to the end user, and the requested asp page wouldn't depend on it. You would be able to look at the logs and follow the activity from the rails site. This might give you some basic insights into performance issues.

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Hi Tom,

Just to fine tune your original question, you’re probably most interested in knowing whether or not a Rails equivalent to your current ASP application will be capable of running on the same hardware and infrastructure as your existing setup with approximately the same resource requirements and performance. If I were sitting down with you as a consultant, I would immediately ask the following questions:

  • What does your current hardware and infrastructure solution look like? (i.e. number and type of servers, where hosted, etc.)
  • What does your application look like? (i.e. mostly static content, dynamic application functionality, little/lots of Ajax, etc.)
  • How much higher is your peak load than your average load? (i.e. 10x, 50x, 100x, etc.) Without that information, you’re going to get a lot of answers about how Rails scales well without really knowing whether or not Rails will scale well for you. However, if we assume a peak load somewhere between 10x and 20x, you’re talking about something on the order of a few hundred requests per minute which is not such a high demand to place on a basic Rails app running on a single recent model server, especially if you’re able to implement some form of caching.
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Hi all!

Thank you very much for the replys, all util information for my decisions.

As Chris noted:

  • My first post need to be fine tuned. Until next monday

I will post the answers for the three questions (actual hardware, app type

and access peak/average relation).

  • I`m most interested in knowing whether or not a Rails equivalent to

current ASP application (and the new app that will be developted) will be

capable of running on the same hardware and infrastructure as my

existing setup with approximately the same resource requirements and

performance.

For now, I can make only a little fine tune: I said one milion pageviews,

but it is not exact, because 50% of the pageviews are consumed by the

forum, and the new rails site won`t include the forum, rather we will

use Vbulletin or Jive SBS. Also, the rest 50% pageviews are consumed partially

by static content.

Regarding hardware, I already use slicehost for some projects and like it.

I`am thinking about to use 2GB slice:

Plan RAM Storage BW Monthly Cost 2GB slice 2048MB 80GB 800GB $130from http://www.slicehost.com/

Of course, it is just a possibility, since this decision depends strongly of the

research I`m doing now (including your replys).

Tom Lobato

Chris Kottom escreveu: