From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2006-09-12T12:20:39+09:00
Subject: Re: The economics of a slow but productive Ruby

On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 11:30:59AM +0900, Carl Lerche wrote:
> 
> Also, yes, there are some extreme cases... such as the google search  
> engine. However, scaling is not linear. Hypothetically, IF at a  
> certain point a .NET web-application takes 5 servers and a similar  
> ruby web-application takes 25 servers (this already sounds a bit  
> ridiculous, but allow me to continue...). This does NOT mean that  
> when this .NET application requires 50 servers to run that the  
> similar ruby web-app will require 250.

No kidding.  For one thing, while it's possible that in some
pathological edge-case it might require five LAMRoR servers to equate
one WS2k3 .NET server, the level of system resources required just to
run each individual server is rather greater for WS2k3/IIS systems than
for Linux/Apache systems.  Additionally, there are more options
available for scaling up with Linux than Windows solutions -- better
load balancing, effective clustering, et cetera (Microsoft promised a
clustering version of Windows last year -- the result being that once
they achieved something testworthy, nobody bothered to use it except for
academic demonstration purposes because, of course, the cost of
licensing would be far greater than any return on investment, especially
considering the artificial technical limitations imposed because of the
MS business model).

There's a sweet spot for vertically integrated Microsoft solutions.  If
you stay inside that sweet spot, it's cheaper to use a .NET solution
than certain other solutions.  Your project, whatever it may be, may or
may not lose to .NET inside that sweet spot -- in fact, I'll go so far
as to say that .NET is almost certainly a net (ha ha) win.  The term
"scalability", however, refers to the mobility of the economics of your
solution, and in that sense one of the standard Linux-based solutions
will probably scale better.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"The measure on a man's real character is what he would do
if he knew he would never be found out." - Thomas McCauley