From: Ruby Maniac Date: 2007-09-26T09:50:04+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby Scales just fine ! On Sep 25, 2:18 pm, "Rimantas Liubertas" wrote: > > Name me some instances when scalability does not require better > > performance characteristics ? (Better means faster...) > > Faster what? Language? Or DB? Or network? > > Suppose you have two languages you can use for the same application. > Language A can process request in 0.001 second, language B can process > request in 0.00005 second (20x faster). Now they both sit and wait for DB > which gives result to a query in 0.01 second. > Does it matter, which language does nothing faster? > Very small percentage of the request life cycle is spent in the part > that's dependant > on language speed that is why language speed is not always as important. > > Regards, > Rimantas > --http://rimantas.com/ I know what you point is but the issues dealing with scalability always hinge on the performance of the langauge one chooses when manipulating data from the data once the data arrives. I would always go with the language that runs faster regardless of how much time the user spends waiting for data because once the data arrives the faster language will process the data faster. Honestly I think the reasoning being used here makes me think those who love Ruby have to manipulate their minds to keep them in love with Ruby or else they might lose their love of Ruby. <-- This is the definition of a religion more than anything else. Another favorite argument for those who love slow inefficient languages revolves around the feeling that being disk I/O bound means the language's performance doesn't matter. I mean, if the language is only being executed 1% of the time and the disk light is on 99% of the time who cares how fast the language is because it only gets 1% of the CPU. <-- This is an ancient argument without merit these days. But even if the language only gets 1% of the CPU time I would choose the language that runs 20x faster to make the best of the 1% of the CPU the language runtime gets. Think of any scenario you want to conjure-up that makes you feel like the performance of the language doesn't matter and I can certainly come-up with a scenario that states the fastest language is the one what should be used either because it can push more data or it can handle requests faster or it just gets the job done more quickly or it saves money on hardware.