From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2004-12-04T13:53:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Possible  opportunity for Rails development

Are there people saying this could be done in any other language 
besides C/C++? Looks to me like the load is pretty intense. Just 
looking at the weblogs.com front page right now shows me that it got 
pinged by about 70 feeds in the past minute ... and this is late on a 
Friday night, probably not peak hours for blogging activity. I dunno 
that much about weblogs.com, but I've got to imagine that the load is 
coming from all the constant updating and recombining of cached RSS 
feeds, not some namby-pamby HTML generation.

I think to be useful in this space you usually have to think in terms 
of serious speed, which often precludes the possibility of using a 
nicer language like Ruby or Python. Another example: PubSub.com is a 
matching service that's tuned to process 3 billion matches per second. 
(This is a number from the lab, not "out in the wild"; in practice 
their server is only being used for a fraction of that.) Apparently 
there's one server that handles all the RSS pings it gets (it's one of 
the standard servers you ping, at least through ping-o-matic), and its 
CPU usually runs at about 3% or 4%. Of course, their service is also 
written in C.


On Dec 3, 2004, at 11:38 PM, James Britt wrote:

> I don't think this has come up here before, but Dave Winer is  looking 
> for assistance in rewriting  Weblogs.com.
>
> http://archive.scripting.com/2004/12/02#weblogscomNeedsARewrite
>
> He seems to think this is a job for C.  Maybe.  Maybe not; others have 
> suggested that a properly designed app in Java or PHP would do fine.
>
> Of course, others may think Ruby might do.
>
> Just a thought, if anyone feels ambitious.
>
>
> James
>
>

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/