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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

>>Ruby (and Rails) scales just fine for 99.281% of things. You just need to throw money at it.

>> Basecamp also has had great success.

Basecamp is a great SAS business, you can tie utilization to revenue. Throwing money at the scaling problem (horizontal) is completely realistic in that scenario.

If you can't tie utilization directly to revenue, if your a pure service like twitter, or an online store with a bad browse vs buy ratio ruby is a BIG liability.

So is ruby fast enough? It depends. Its a business decision, not a technology one, and one I would have a hard time justifying for a lot of startups.

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A few years ago my side project (and my second ever ruby/rails project) unexpectedly became quite popular.

Last couple of years it's been doing about 50,000 (user facing) api requests per second during high load, with almost a million concurrent users. It's 99% rails.

We (me and a second guy) have ran this system on ~10 (cheap) servers, five of which run the actual rails app. The rails app has probably been the easiest component to scale for us. We obviously do some caching - but it's not like our database could live without that caching anyways.

And even though we have been an ad-financed bootstrapped company the hosting/hw costs has been very manageable. There are probably many valid reasons to chose something else than rails, but I wanted to share my experience w.r.t. making it work for our non-SAS needs.

I love stories like this, as they can be Illuminating, and I'm curious for more answers.

1. profitable? Is it your day job or Side job or a "lifestyle business", Pays for my beer...

2. I would love a number next to cheap ($5? $20)

3. Where are you located, and is that the market your serving.

Because I live around Silicon Valley, my perception of what your saying might be really different from what it actually is... is cheep $20 a month, or is it $5?

1. Employing twenty people and making a profit.

2. Per app server we paid less than the cost of a macbook pro. Between 0.001 and 0.0015 USD in hardware costs per thousand ad views, which makes it irrelevant to the company bottom line.

3. Europe, global-ish market.

> you can tie utilization to revenue

This is a critical aspect.

If it's purely ad-driven, you probably have very little money coming in for the number of pages you crank out, so you need to optimize them a lot.

If you're charging for your app - which you should be in a lot of cases - then something like Rails is likely ok.

The latter case is much more likely outside of Silicon Valley/VC-fueled startups.

> If you're charging for your app - which you should be in a lot of cases

I think it really depends. Many of the most successful businesses thrive purely on ads. Also you'll have to consider which market you're targeting. In the US many people maybe are used to paying a reasonable amount, but in many developing countries people just won't use it if it's a paid app.

Even then I think it is a hard sell.

Lets say that the gain you realize from writing in another language is 10% of your infrastructure costs. It might not matter day one. At some point that will represent a significant sum of money, in either absolute or relative terms.

Premature optimization and all that... Worry about it when it looks like it might matter.

Worry way, way more about building the right product at the right price for your customers, and adding the right features.

Hardware is cheap. Developers are not.

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