That is debatable. Both GitHub and Hackyderm are large-scale Rails deployments, and both share a DevOps engineer (Nóva) who I've heard complaining about Ruby DevOps at least once. Twitter was forced to abandon Rails (being the poster child for Rails at the time).
This is not a reply to you, but I decided a long time ago that I will not let this argument about scalability remain with response.
If you have already decided not to try Ruby on Rails or any Ruby framework, say so.
It is ok to have different preferences.
But this thing with Ruby needs to be more scalable is a very weak argument.
Here is why:
In the tech industry, it is not uncommon to come across companies that opt to rewrite their tech stack in a different language, often citing scalability as a reason. While this argument holds some merit, it's worth noting that scalability is a complex issue that affects all web frameworks, not just Ruby on Rails. Therefore, criticizing Ruby on Rails solely based on scalability may not be a strong argument when you take into consideration the idea that there are very big companies build with it.
- Ruby on Rails is scalable for 99.999% of all startups created with it. This 99.999% will die for any other reason but not because of their tech stack. Again the same can be said about any other web framework. Of course the 99.999% is just a made up number based on the fact that there are so few companies failing because of their tech stack scalability.
- Twitter and Github are maybe in the top 0.0001% of web apps when thinking about scale or usage. Hope you (the reader of this comment) will create a startup that will be so successful in terms of scale. But the chances are that with 99.999% confidence, you are not them, and the chances to create a product that will be like them are slim.
- The problems at scale are not only technological but also organizational.
Now open this list https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies and this list https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/public and try to check how many of them are using Ruby. There are quite a few in this top. It scales or else there should not be any big company using Ruby there.
You are right of course, but not for your stated reasons. Essentially RoR doesn't scale. RoR scalability is a meme, anything else scales much better. From node to PHP, they all can do much more on much less hardware. To achieve hyperscale with RoR you have to throw absurd hardware with layers upon layers of load balancers in front of it.
But I'd argue that it doesn't matter at all for a startup. Like you said most won't ever reach the point where they need such a thing. But they all benefit quite dearly from the excellent developer velocity provided by RoR.
> most won't ever reach the point where they need such a thing
I considered covering this argument in my gp comment. What if your startup does grow to the scale where it becomes an issue? Do you suspend new user signups until you can do the rewrite? Or do you just let things keep spiraling, like GitHub? Because by choosing RoR you are making an assertion up front: our startup will never scale beyond X users (because you're never going to get buy-in for a rewrite).
I disagree with:
> Because by choosing RoR you are making an assertion up front: our startup will never scale beyond X users (because you're never going to get buy-in for a rewrite).
How can this be true when we know that Shopify, Gitlab, Github and all others are using RoR.
Here is a more concrete scale[1]:
> We served 75.98 Million requests per minute to our commerce platform at peak. That’s 1.27 Million requests per second!
Is that a bit enough limit for you?
Here is more:
> We achieved 99.999+% uptime while averaging 3 Terabytes per minute of egress traffic across our infrastructure [2]
[1] https://twitter.com/shopifyeng/status/1597983926126977024
[2] https://twitter.com/shopifyeng/status/1597983918900510720
By the time you reach this problem, you'll have an army of developers to take care of this.
I've worked for three successful startups that started on PHP that couldn't scale the PHP code bases with their customer growth. All three rebuilt on Rails and are still in business and on Rails today.
Another startup where I'm very close with the founders they are on Node and they say the system is "a complete dumpster fire". They wish they had built on anything else.
The company I'm with now is primarily a giant Rails monolith and we have 100s of thousands of users connected at any given time. Our biggest bottleneck isn't Rails it's Postgres. We are dealing with billions of rows and Postgres isn't really even the problem. The problem is our data model wasn't designed in a way that would allow sharding/partitioning. Even this isn't an intractable problem. We create updated schemas, migrate, backfill. What we don't need to do is leave Rails "because it doesn't scale".
Most companies that moved off of Rails because of scalability either don't actually understand scalability or it was 15 years ago and they were on Rails 2 when it was still immature.
Most battle tested languages and frameworks can be adequately scaled if you have the right devs. I think that a lot of the reason we see system rewrites due to scalability is more because startups tend to hire developers that like to "build new things fast" and those aren't necessarily the same as the developers that have already dealt with 1M+ users at petabyte scale.
Once you become that successful sometimes the solution is to bring in people that have solved these problems of scalability previously. This sometimes results in rewrites in whole or in part because their experience is on a different stack.
In one of the PHP to Rails (for scalability) projects I worked on I was contacted quite early in the process. I am a longtime friend with one of the business owners. The existing developers could not scale the product horizontally and were already on the largest instances available at the time so there was no more ability to scale vertically.
They had hired a new technical lead that had extensive experience scaling Rails, but most of the team only knew PHP. My team did both Rails and PHP consulting at the time and we were hired to speed up the rewrite in Rails while the PHP devs were doing a mix of trying to keep things running and learn Rails so they could support after the rewrite.
The first thing I did was review the existing PHP codebase. I then advised that they not switch to Rails because I firmly believed that in about 3 months the PHP version could be refactored to allow for adequate horizontal scalability. The full rewrite was expected to take a little over a year.
The owner agreed that my assessment was probably right, but he still opted for the rewrite because the new lead was competent at scalability and likely would have quit if they stayed on PHP.
https://github.blog/2023-04-06-building-github-with-ruby-and...