Cal’s well-received talk from DjangoCon is very funny while making some great points. Most of his “serious” complaints about Django revolve around massive scaling, which he deals with on a daily basis at Flickr (which has both a huge data set and huge traffic). The reality is that none of the hot shit frameworks right now (Django, Rails, Cake, etc.) offer a lot of built in niceties for this level of scaling, and this is why (or at least part of the reason) we have a few notable sites built on them that haven’t managed to scale well at all as they’ve gotten more popular (coughTWITTERcough). The big question, of course, is: should a general-purpose framework like Django or Rails cater to the top 100 websites in the world, or should they focus on the needs of the other 99.9%? I don’t know the answer (and Cal says he doesn’t, either), but it’s an interesting topic. Plus, did I mention Cal is funny? Visit site »
In response to a Michael Arrington post on TechCrunch that as clearly designed to irritate, Ev and Biz at Twitter politely explain several details of their architecture and how Twitter works, and what they’re doing to make the service more reliable in the future. Nice. Visit site »
After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails…
As a Django fan and evangelist, I admit it would give me great pleasure to see this as a colossal failure for Rails, point, laugh, and generally poke fun at all the Rails fanboys and girls.
But let’s be real for one minute. Twitter doesn’t suck because of Rails. Twitter sucks because they have ridiculous amounts of traffic (especially to their API and SMS gateways), a limited ability to cache (a non-realtime Twitter is a pretty useless Twitter), and (as far as I can tell), they’re not making any money, so they probably have limited resources to pour into more hardware.
The bottom line is that Twitter will probably cause major scaling problems for any platform, be it Rails, Django, Java, .NET, PHP, or tin cans with a string tied between them. Ruby is undeniably slow compared to Python, Java, and PHP, but I really doubt the problems Twitter deals with are at the Ruby level, anyway. Much as I wish they weren’t, anyone who says Twitter sucks because of Ruby on Rails is either foolish or joking.
Twitter sucks because of Rails. Just joking. Visit site »
This conference just so happens to be in Seattle, on my birthday. So, if any of you geeks are interested in scalability, come up to the S-E-A and we’ll party. Visit site »