Slides for my RailsConf talk: “Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up”

By jason May 18, 2007
10 Comments

Thank you all 200-300ish people that showed up for my talk this morning.

Here’s the slides.

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10 Responses

Posted by Wes Felter 18. May 2007 at 4:42 am :

I did not attend, so I have a belated question about slide 75. The Force10 E300 appears to be a 132-port switch, not 48-port. And aren’t those things kinda expensive? Do they have some specific feature that you really like?

I may have room in my budget this year to replace some circa 2001 BlackDiamonds, so I’m interested in such things.

BTW, thanks for the info about $/Amp.

Posted by Robert Simplicio 18. May 2007 at 5:43 am :

Jason, you never cease to amaze me at the amount of information you can uptake, and relate it to those of us who don’t have the luxury of your brain.

Thanks for posting this up, it helps out a tremendous amount.

Posted by Mark James Adams 18. May 2007 at 7:50 am :

Can you say more on why Ruby should be process-based, for the benefit of those of us you didn’t see you talk?

Posted by Joe Van Dyk 18. May 2007 at 3:17 pm :

I imagine it’s because:

1. Threads are hard to do right.
2. Context switching between processes isn’t likely to be your bottleneck.

But I’m not that smart. Someone else chime in please.

Posted by Rod McLaughlin 18. May 2007 at 6:57 pm :

Thanks for the talk. I have one comment, and one question.

You are right to say that the app server may not be your bottleneck. It was very informative to be reminded of the dozens of other places you should look. But having eliminated all the others (and deciding you can’t afford Big IP:), what if the app server is your bottleneck? Is it conceivable that a Java solution may scale better than your Ruby solution? It is true that you can make anything perform if you have the time, money and inclination. But if you don’t, you may have to choose application software on the basis of performance. I could produce a more scalable web app on Java and Linux than VB.NET and Windows – but there are people in Redmond who could do the opposite! But could I produce a Rails solution on Linux which at least approaches the performance of the Java solution, all other things being equal? That is what I am trying to find out.

The other thing is, you showed a really cool configuration trick where you had `hostname` backticked in a YAML file so hundreds of mongrels could read the same file. How do you get Ruby to understand the backticks? I tried `hostname` in database.yml and it didn’t work. Thanks for any information.

Posted by Nick S 18. May 2007 at 10:41 pm :

Jason, I’m smiling.

Glad to see the inner biologist is still lurking on slide 188.

Posted by R Lennox 21. May 2007 at 2:16 am :

Nice article.

Question though. What are your thoughts on Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud and S3 storage services. They sound appealing from a scalability point of view.

Posted by Iain Wright 22. May 2007 at 5:11 pm :

Great article Jason. Thanks for sharing

Posted by Manoel Lemos 23. May 2007 at 8:57 pm :

Hi Jason, its very very nice to see this amount of awesomely organized and useful data gathered and processed for us. You know, I’m an small fish alone in a fishbowl trying to learn and put the BlogBlogs up and running. Joyent is helping me a lot and our small talk on the phone is now driving my next steps. I hope than one day I can star worrying about some of the problems you presented nice solutions on your presentation.
Thanks for sharing!!!

Posted by Andy Mayer 10. December 2007 at 11:05 pm :

Jason, thanks for the great talk. I have been trying to locate my written notes but have since moved office….

During the Q & A at the end, you mentioned the best OS in your experience for running a single server. I think you mentioned FreeBSD. Can you please confirm? And what version? Thanks for any information.

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