From: khaines@...
Date: 2006-09-10T09:47:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programming

On Sun, 10 Sep 2006, Phlip wrote:

> Joel Spolsky wrote:
>
>> [Ruby is slow] so if you become The Next MySpace,
>> you'll be buying 5 times as many boxes as the .NET guy
>> down the hall.
>
> Last time I checked, 5 new boxes were cheaper than 5 new programmers...

Slow and fast are notoriously difficult to pin down, especially when 
dealing with dynamically generated web content.  If there is much in the 
way of database queries or similar activity involved in generating the 
page, that can quickly become the bottleneck.  If the application is such 
that the db data can be cached in some way, even if the dynamic generation 
is still taking place, speeds can be fairly fast.

My in-development IOWA branch is, in testing, pumping some real (as in, 
destined for a production web site) dynamic web pages in the 2.5k to 4k 
bytes size range in excess of 200/second on a modest 2ghz AMD Athlon 
server.

If I take that same dynamically generated content and let the framework 
cache it (and serve the cached content itself) in tests I am pushing 3800 
to 3900 requests per second for a 2.6k page THROUGH RUBY CODE, and about 
1000 requests per second for a 38k page.

"Ruby is slow." is easy to say, but in practice, where web apps are 
concerned, ruby can be fast enough.


Kirk Haines