April 15, 2007
So, Alex Payne contacted me last night and we’ve swapped a couple of emails since so that I could clarify what the scaling issues (other than those that are database related) were that they were experiencing and the answer is simply that the actual monetary cost of maintaining (and adding) as many virtual private server slices as they’re having to is becoming prohibitive. There’s no technical reason that they can’t keep scaling application servers horizontally — it’s the associated costs that are becoming prohibitive. In this light, Alex’s comment about looking at moving critical stuff out of rjs, ActiveRecord, etc. and the lamentation about the slowness of Ruby make sense, as well. I raised the possibility of moving from VPS slices to dedicated servers and Alex replied that, “At a certain point you realize that you’re paying for 8 VPSs, and that cost could be consolidated into just buying/renting the physical machine that those VPSs are on.” To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of VPS — a couple of VPS slices and you’re looking at the cost of a dedicated box (Street Easy has gone this route, renting dedicated boxes from Layered Tech). But to each their own.
Anyway, Alex closed his last email with, “I hope those people don’t tear into the next person who tries to share his experience scaling Rails. Nobody’s going to be interested in talking to a hostile, unreceptive audience. The biggest threat to innovation in the Rails community right now is attitude.” And I’ll confess to be so focused on the technological reasons that scaling Rails by adding application servers makes so much sense that I’d completely missed the financial dimension as to how much this must be costing them. My apologies, Alex. I do wish that the monetary cost had been explicitly stated in the interview for those of us that are too myopic to have seen the connection.