From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2007-10-04T00:00:30+09:00 Subject: Re: Recent Criticism about Ruby (Scalability, etc.) Charles Oliver Nutter wrote: > Chad Perrin wrote: >> On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 10:40:04PM +0900, Ruby Maniac wrote: >>> Ruby scales just fine as long as you are willing to throw a ton of >>> compute hardware at it ! >>> >>> I believe Twitter is successfully using Ruby for their site but then >>> they have also invested in a ton of servers dedicated to running >>> hundreds of Mongrels. >>> >>> So yeah, get out your checkbooks and write more checks for more >>> servers and sure Ruby scales just fine ! >> >> Assuming about an 80k salary and a 2,000 dollar server, a server is worth >> about 50 hours of programmer time. >> >> I just figured I'd provide a simple starting place for comparing the cost >> of software development with that of hardware upgrades. > > I find this perspective puzzling. In most large datacenters, the big > cost of operation is neither the cost of the servers nor the cost of the > development time to put code on them, it's the peripheral electricity, > administration and cooling costs once the application written must be > deployed to thousands of users. > > An application that scales poorly will require more hardware. Hardware > is cheap, but power and administrative resources are not. If you need 10 > servers to run a poorly-scaling language/platform versus some smaller > number of servers to run other "faster/more scalable" > languages/platforms, you're paying a continuously higher cost to keep > those servers running. Better scaling means fewer servers and lower > continuous costs. > > Even the most inexpensive and quickly-developed application's savings > will be completely overshadowed if deployment to a large datacenter > results in unreasonably high month-on-month expenses. > > - Charlie > > Thank you!! It's about time somebody put a dollar figure on the cost of poor scalability and highlighted the nonsense of "adding servers is cheaper than hiring programmers." They are two entirely different economic propositions.