25 karma · joined February 2, 2013
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.
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.
Worst case, your app is exceptionally hard to upgrade and I feel for your effort.
1) Adapting libraries without regards to long term maintenance. I.e. single person project that he/she does because a current client needs it, without planning on having to take over stewardship of the library or fork it when the person eventually abandons it.
2) Adapting libraries that hook into rails internal apis, without writing this shortcut up as a debt that you might have to pay later when the private api changes.
I'm personally very thankful for all of the hard work the community has done to help us upgrade.
If you have found pieces of the upgrading puzzle that are missing, then please consider contributing back. 2.3 > 3 is the hardest one. It gets a lot easier.