Social Glass

I find it interesting as a blogger that, several months after a post is written, I get a flurry of comments on it. One tends to think that people only read the latest posts, but the evidence seems to contradict this perception.

Anyway, I found the recent post at rc3.org about RubyonRails being slow very interesting. I posted a few months ago about Java’s ability to scale with the long tail and recently received some well put comments indicating that the speed of Java is just fine, and that speed issues are generally caused by bad architecture. I argued that the popularity of PHP and Rails over Java in the Web 2.0 space seemed to show that those languages/platforms were perceived to scale well with the long tail (whereas Java seems to be king inside the Enterprise, which tends to have a much lower user base).  It seems that, at least with Ruby on Rails, the perception was based more on hype than fact.
Twitter’s recent popularity has been a good Stress and Volume Testing ground for Rails, which is a relatively new platform, and it seems that Rails is much slower than Java, PHP or Python platforms. This idea is raised at rc3.org, where Rafe Colburn writes:

I do wonder, though, if this kind of information [Twitter’s statement that Rails is slow] is going to push some startups over to PHP or Java, even if they’d prefer the development efficiencies offered by Rails.

I’m pulling for Java.