*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I won't argue with you that a dynamic language, such as Ruby, is going to be inherently slower then a compiled one. One thing I would like to point out however; which I didn't see mentioned on either your post, or the one referenced, is that the only reason Twitter is having these problems is due to the fact that they are receiving 11k requests/second. Perhaps my math is wrong, but I don't see how this qualifies as being any less requests then site you mentioned.

I don't care what you're using, Rails, PHP, ASP.net, I don't imagine any framework could handle that load with an out of the box configuration.

Hey Josh! I finally posted something where I got you to comment. Nice!

Ok. I searched around and can't find anything that taunts they get 11K requests / second. Requests are different than page views anyway. and the numbers I'm quoting are page views (there is a difference). I could have a page with 11,000 1 pixel gifs on it and claim I served up 5 million requests today on my site. Sounds impressive, but not really.

According to my searches there are only 60,000 registered users on Twitter total. Here's a quote from March 21st on Information Week:

"The site launched less than a year ago and has drawn 60,000 users, who essentially tell each other what they are doing"

I don't think they have approached the dating's sites capacity of 50K concurrent users if they only have 60,000 subscribers. I also counted up the images on your twitter page and there are 26 images on the page which account mostly for the friends pics on the page. That's not including all the images in the style sheets.

BTW, twitter is ranked 1,410 on Alexa and Plentyoffish is ranked 718. Again I'll point out that one of the top traffic sites on the internet is running on one server. Obviously if they are 718 and twitter is 1410 then twitter should only have one server too. I bet that isn't the case.

BTW, I'm only in the top 1,817,879! Man I have a long way to go! Great to hear from you. - The Elder

Keith -

All valid points...

I will be attending a conference this weekend in which the guys from Twitter will be talking about how they're handling (or not handling) the load. I'll report back next week.

http://www.quantcast.com/traffic-compare.jsp?domain0=twitter.com&domain1=plentyoffish.com&domain2=&domain3=&domain4=

Quantcast measures dailly traffic in the US. Given that Twitter is used exclusively by tech people its going to have its ranking skewed at least 100 fold on alexa.

Compete.com also shows Plentyoffish way out in front. http://home.compete.com.edgesuite.net/plentyoffish.com+twitter.com_sess.png

16Million visitors verse 300k for twitter, plentyoffish isn't even plentyoffish's largest market.

All I have to say is that everything is in the eye of the beholder. If you are a Ruby's fan then obviously you think that it is the best thing since sliced bread. On the other hand if you are a Microsoft fan, then obviously you are going to look at .Net and be like: oh my gosh this is fast.

I think that both have their advantages and both can be used for specific purposes, but be certain that the speed of improvement of Rails is better than the speed of improvement of .NET.

Ciao,

Jenn

I'm sitting here laughing as I type this because you honestly just said a dynamic scripting language was faster than a compiled strongly typed language. Wow. I don't know where to begin. Perhaps the best place to begin is not even bother.

A wise man once said: "You can't fix stupid."