could ror support a service on the scale of myspace? i've been reading about problems with the types of databses that ruby can work with?
johntmarino wrote:
could ror support a service on the scale of myspace? i've been reading about problems with the types of databses that ruby can work with?
RoR is a member of the "LAMP" category of websites - Linux, Apache, MySQL, and a Perl-like language.
Word on the street is Google uses LAMP, including the MySQL. I don't know how they cluster their MySQL databases, or if they simply write everything to work with a distributed set of databases. But in general the LAMP model scales by running the slow soft front-end language (Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.) on thousands of cheap load-balanced servers. Then the database runs on one fast expensive server, or possibly on a cluster of servers.
Note that "Google" refers to the math term for (IIRC) 10^100. A big number.
Ruby is hardly an optimal language. A few method calls may result in tens of thousands of CPU operations. Apache and MySQL, by contrast, are written in C and painstakingly optimized. So you throw cheap hardware at the Ruby layer, and get the best hardware for the C layer. You can scale when Rails pages don't abuse their session variable, and they run as event-driven as possible.
could ror support a service on the scale of myspace? i've been reading about problems with the types of databses that ruby can work with?
Define "support". No technology you can pick up off the shelf will let you _run_ a service on the scale of MySpace (or Yahoo, or eBay, or Amazon, or Google, etc.). If you can build something up to that level you get to figure out how to run it.
thanks for the input guys. i'm developing a web app and i just want to make sure i'm not wasting time and money on something i'll need to ditch later.