Twitter and Ruby on Rails
- Published May 2nd, 2008 in Tech Comment
First off, one clear remark: according to Evan Williams, Twitter is not abandoning Ruby on Rails. Got it?
Secondly, on an application such as Twitter that relies heavily on services and messaging Rails accounts for.. hmm.. 3% of the whole application?
Twitter is suffering from being a very write-intensive application, having an architecture not initially thought for scalability (handling tons of write requests per second and propagating them is not an easy task) and because, well, everyone uses it.
I do remember the numerous times Hi5, Digg or Facebook were down and, guess what, those are PHP and Java applications.
Twitter guys discovered that scaling pains with RoR love/hate stories is a powerful marketing tool. And they keep using it over and over.
Pedro, I don’t think that they need it anymore. But granted, RoR helped them market their product.
Recipe for success: do something on a new and powerful web framework.