A great presentation about scaling Twitter that took place in the Ruby Conference here in Santa Clara. Unfortunately I didn’t have the chance to attend it but some friends did. Here’s the Scaling Twitter presentation.
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Watch the video along with the slides:
http://stakeventures.com/articles/2007/04/23/video-of-blaine-cooks-scaling-twitter
Joao,
Thanks! Blaine is quite a nice guy.
Nice slides.
But does it mean the twitter show is over? No more of this?
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/04/16/dhh-translation
What a pity… ;-)
Come on, Mark Pilgrim is a respectful guy but it went too far with that. Starting these rages leads nowhere.
And, actually, I don’t get what Mark has to do with Ruby and the Rails community. Can he mind of his own business? Python is far from being perfect.
Anyway, childish behavior.
Yeah maybe childish, but also fun. And it’s nothing on Rails, it’s on DHH. More and more I hear people saying that Rails is cool but DHH is a pain. Maybe after this one he will … “upgrade”. Anyhow, I don’t care.
Great presentation? Before changing and optimizing queries this guy is suggesting to de-normalize and “index everything” on the database. Come on… It’s not a bad presentation but I’ve seen better ones.
Suddenly, everyone is cheering about this Twitter thing and making it the “rails scales” flagship. Of course rails scales, as everything does. Maybe not everybody can do it, but add a nice DBA engineer with sysadmin skills to your team and he’ll do the job.
Pedro,
DHH is arrogant. Some like, others don’t. Nevertheless, he built Rails and he has my admiration for that. I owe him a lot for that fact, whether people like to accept that or not. Like I owe to Linux, LaTeX, or any other piece of Free/Open Source Software someone built that I use for free. Free comes with a price — recognition.
Tiago,
I think it’s a little bit more complex than optimizing the database. The framework does a lot of hidden things that create huge bottlenecks and those guys definitely have a point when saying ActiveRecord should have a nano version for these kind of stuff. Anyway, it’s the price of having such a complete and pleasing framework. It will eventually scale even more but it’s still missing built-in scalability features that help doing load balancing and database pooling.