Joel Spolsky follows up on his earlier remarks about scaling out a Ruby on Rails site with this post on Ruby performance. I’m afraid it is a thoroughly unconvincing and surprising argument. He states...
I understand the philosophy that developer cycles are more important than cpu cycles, but frankly that’s just a bumper-sticker slogan and not fair to the people who are complaining about performance.
A bumper-sticker slogan? That’s a surprising statement considering that FogBugz is not written entirely in C. Is it because Wasabi compiled to PHP or VBScript is saving CPU cycles? Hardly.
As one might expect from a well designed application, FogBugz is written in a productive high-level language for the very reason that Ruby advocates push ruby - it saves developer cycles and thus money.
Also as one would expect from a well written application, in the few cases where performance is a problem, those particular features were written with a lower-level high performance language.
So why wouldn’t this approach apply to Ruby? From the tenor of his post, Joel seems to indicate that those who choose to implement their enterprise applications on Ruby are so religiously blinded by the benefits of Rails that they would never dare allow the impurity of non-Ruby code to enter the boundary of their architecture.
Really now?
To his credit, Joel states at the end...
In the meantime I stand by my claim that it's not appropriate for every situation.
And this is true. It may not work well for that computation intensive Bayesian filter. But is anyone making the claim that Ruby is appropriate for every situation? The claim I’ve heard is that it is certainly appropriate for many more situations than Joel gives credit for. I believe that.
Update: Related Links
tags: Ruby, Ruby On Rails, Joel Spolsky, Performance