"I've heard a few people mention that they heard that Rails doesn't scale [...] any suggestions on how we might alleviate their doubt?"So I rallied the troops (Jack and Josh) and we set out on a little informal fact-finding mission. Here's what we've come up with thus far...
How 7 Mongrels Handled a 550k Pageview Digging
Not a lot of in-depth analysis here, just an impressive scaling success story with a pretty bar chart of the traffic load and an itemization of the hardware and software involved along with costs.
It's boring to scale with Ruby on Rails
Granted, this one is written by the man himself, Mister Rails, so you have to take it with a grain of salt, but he hits upon the common themes, which are caching, load balancing, and:
"Scaling the database is the `hard part'"Unfortunately he gets a little off track in the second half of the essay and goes into the cost analysis of productivity and happiness, which is where you'll lose the attention of most investors.
Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster
I love the High Scalability blog; it's the dessert of my weekly reading. Granted Twitter still has its problems to this day, but you can't deny its monumental achievement in wide-spread adoption and ungodly levels of traffic. In addition to the aforementioned staples of caching, load balancing, and database optimization, they add partitioning and queueing to the mix.
Engine Yard Bets Big on Rubinius
What does this have to do with the scalability of Rails? Well nothing explicit in the article, but it supports two important movements that will eventually lead to a greater good.
First of all, Rubinius is one of three now mainstream Ruby implementations (the other two being Matz's original and Sun's JRuby). Competition here is good. This means better, faster, more stable Ruby environments, which will translate into a faster and more stable Rails.
Secondly, Rubinius is eventually going to lead to mod_rubinius, which will lead to even more scalability of the Rails platform by allowing us to leave separate single-process servers (like Mongrel) on the wayside.
Personally my money is on JRuby (and Glassfish) for the long haul; if you haven't checked out Glassfish yet, you're doing yourself a disservice!
Benchmark Invests in RoR Provider
Pretty much a no-brainer here. Benchmark Capital invested $3.5 million into Engine Yard, whose main business is Rails hosting.
Riding the Rails with WebSphere
If Glassfish is a little too cutting-edge for you, and you're all about being "enterprisey", then IBM's WebSphere is probably right up your alley.
At this point, between IBM and Sun's support of Ruby and Rails, and the multi-million dollar investments other Rails-based ventures are receiving, I'm beginning to wonder how savvy are these potential investors Stewart is getting flak from.
But we're not done yet...
Can Rails Scale? Absolutely!
This article is a pretty good round-up of the more recognizable names using Rails, such as Yellow Pages, Basecamp, and the infamous Twitter, as well as a rehashing of the same old story: caching, spreading the load, and tuning your database.
Friends for Sale Architecture - A 300 Million Page View/Month Facebook RoR App Todd Hoff's picture
Here we are again at my favorite feed, High Scalability, with another Rails scalability success story. This time it's a Facebook app, and a rather popular one at that. I won't spoil the surprise for you, because their is no surprise -- it's the same old story: cache, distribute, and:
"The most important thing we learned is that your scalability problems is pretty much always, always, always the database."
So in summary, there's plenty of good ammunition out there against the naysayers, and soon there will be one more when AdPickles launches and sets a whole new bar by which Rails scalability will be measured. No pressure Jack and Josh.