From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-11-27T06:48:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Two Advanced Ruby Performance Questions

Sunny Hirai wrote:
> First, I am a Ruby newbie but am an experienced developer of highly
> scalable applications.
>
> I like the Ruby community because it is very friendly and helpful;
> however, I wanted to give my background because the answer to this
> question (despite being a newbie to Ruby) won't be your typical 80/20
> optimize when you need to, watch your database first, or bandwidth is
> the limiting factor type question.
>
> Our application servers on our current application run in highly
> optimized Coldfusion (sub 100ms page response times) has about a dozen
> application servers attached to it with probably about a dozen more
> supporting servers. We have dual load balancers, dual Firewalls, RAIDed
> dbs on multiple servers, and a 100 Mbps connection (likely to be
> upgraded). We anticipate this new app to run on up to 100 application
> servers eventually but this is obviously dependant on app server and
> code performance.
>
> I know to optimize when it's important but I am concerned about the
> overhead of a framework I want to place on top of Ruby. The RAILS
> framework, unfortunately, is too limiting for the application we are
> planning (at least the VC parts of MVC) and prefer the control and
> performance understanding of having built most of the framework
> ourselves anyways.
>   
Have you looked at Nitro or IOWA? There are some extensive descriptions 
of them in Hal Fulton's second edition of "The Ruby Way". Nitro in 
particular seems to be quite flexible and may do what you want where 
Rails can't.

[snip]


> FINAL COMMENTS
>
> Sorry for the monster large post. This is incredibly important for us
> and will help us decide if we want to switch to Ruby for our new
> application. We have a large amount of good code in ColdFusion but as an
> agile company, I can see the benefits of Ruby down the line, especially
> after a couple of years. Mostly, I love the clean syntax and the overall
> design of the language.
>   
I don't know much about ColdFusion, but it hardly seems to me like it's 
going away any time soon. I would think that, aside from the "agility" 
of Ruby, the main motivator for switching from ColdFusion to Ruby would 
be to reduce software license costs. :) In any event, despite your 
concerns about Ruby's performance, your decision needs to be made on 
economic grounds and not necessarily on technical ones. After all, 
you've demonstrated a willingness to throw hardware at your existing 
scalable ColdFusion applications. I would be more concerned about what 
would happen when a team highly experienced with ColdFusion and making 
scalable applications with it suddenly are "asked" to jump head first 
into Ruby.

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.