Yes. I was on a call with a couple of the twitter devs around this time. They were running on 30 odd instances at joyent. So while they were decent size, they were nothing like they are now.
Mongrel was always pretty solid actually. It was originally developed for verisign as I recall, and even in its early versions stuck much more closely to the http specs than other webservers.
It caught a lot of flack because of application code blasting out the ruby heap by touching too many objects. Mongrel isn't really to blame for that. With early versions of ActiveRecord it was easy to materialize large result sets without realizing it. A lot of people felt the pain of using associations everywhere without thinking about what would happen when the joins would go north of 10k objects. Not really mongrel's fault.
I had that thought as well. And honestly I'm not entirely sure which version they were running. By now the community has learned a bunch of lessons and we take some of those for granted.
Still, the guys over at Twitter could have said "We couldn't scale this technology given our requirements and current knowledge so we went with what we are comfortable with, and thats Java." Instead, they blamed Rails. And now any Rails hater brings up Twitter in a flame war. Even though it was some 4-5 years ago.
Twitter is still the largest Rails site on the web as far as I know, so anyone who says that Twitter hates Rails is either being taken out of context or confused.
Comments
Was it mature enough then to have been used in production at twitter's scale?
Yes. I was on a call with a couple of the twitter devs around this time. They were running on 30 odd instances at joyent. So while they were decent size, they were nothing like they are now.
Mongrel was always pretty solid actually. It was originally developed for verisign as I recall, and even in its early versions stuck much more closely to the http specs than other webservers.
It caught a lot of flack because of application code blasting out the ruby heap by touching too many objects. Mongrel isn't really to blame for that. With early versions of ActiveRecord it was easy to materialize large result sets without realizing it. A lot of people felt the pain of using associations everywhere without thinking about what would happen when the joins would go north of 10k objects. Not really mongrel's fault.
I had that thought as well. And honestly I'm not entirely sure which version they were running. By now the community has learned a bunch of lessons and we take some of those for granted.
Still, the guys over at Twitter could have said "We couldn't scale this technology given our requirements and current knowledge so we went with what we are comfortable with, and thats Java." Instead, they blamed Rails. And now any Rails hater brings up Twitter in a flame war. Even though it was some 4-5 years ago.
Twitter is still the largest Rails site on the web as far as I know, so anyone who says that Twitter hates Rails is either being taken out of context or confused.