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5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne

March 29th, 2007 · 148 Comments

Alex Payne - Twitter Developer

I reached out to one of the developers on the Twitter team and asked if he would answer 5 questions. Alex not only answered them but is very honest and up front with his answers. Thanks Alex!

  1. How did you end up on the Twitter team? What is a little of your background?Pretty simple: they posted on their blog that they were looking for
    people in late 2006, and I jumped on it! I think I replied within a
    few hours of the posting. I starting doing contract work on Twitter
    earlier this year, and earlier this month I accepted a full-time job
    after working in the Obvious office for a week. I’m moving out to
    San Francisco in mid-April, and I can’t wait to be out there with the
    rest of the team.I’ve lived most of my life in the Washington, DC area. As one might
    guess, being in the nation’s capital means that everything revolves
    around politics. Most of my early jobs were developing web
    applications for various non-profits, non-governmental organizations,
    and for-profits supporting campaigns and such. I’ve also done some
    information security work (an equally ubiquitous industry around DC).I came to Rails after working in PHP like many developers, but I’ve
    never been a language purist. I was looking at developing some Ruby-
    based blogging software with a friend a couple years before Rails was
    on the scene, but at that time it just wasn’t a friendly language for
    web endeavors. When Rails first crossed my eyes I remember thinking,
    “cool, someone made Ruby work for web apps!” I jumped right in to
    working with the early releases.
  2. How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load?By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right
    now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues -
    issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner
    than I think we would on another framework.The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling
    Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem
    is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel
    cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this
    point in time there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one
    database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out
    of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases,
    neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it’s not just
    cost, it’s time, and time is that much more precious when people can[’t]
    reach your site.None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing
    for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that
    makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely
    punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of
    traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that
    Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move
    the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s
    mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people
    are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right
    now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application
    and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby
    will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big
    Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of
    those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
  3. How difficult has it been to add hardware to the environment?We’re hosted at Joyent, and they make the “throw more CPUs at it”
    approach easy. We’ve been able to get new server containers
    provisioned within hours, generally.I’d like to experiment with Amazon EC2 to handle load spikes, but the
    prospective database latency is prohibitive.
  4. How large is the current Twitter road map? How many features are you guys looking to add?Not to be evasive, but it’s hard to say right now. There’s a lot
    that we’d like to do while still maintaining a simple, focused, easy-
    to-use service. Lots of people are interested in a groups feature,
    and that’s definitely on our radar. There’s lots of good stuff coming!
  5. How do you see Twitter affecting the blogosphere, IM, SMS, and Email?I don’t think Twitter is a replacement for blogging, just as I don’t
    think blogging is a replacement for journalism. As far as
    communicating ideas to an audience, one-to-many, Twitter works best
    for those particular ideas that are terse yet expressive, and don’t
    benefit greatly from an in-place thread of replies. For more
    personal (some might say mundane) updates, I think Twitter is a
    better fit than a blog. People are going to talk about their cats,
    inevitably, but do you really want someone talking about their cat in
    more than 140 characters?I think the real power of Twitter is its ability to channel over
    different mediums at the user’s whim. IM, SMS, email, and the web
    are just transports as far as Twitter is concerned. Generally, you
    have to go out and get information via whatever medium that
    information is on. With Twitter, information can come to you via
    whatever medium you prefer. Or, if you want some space, you can
    easily turn off the information tap with a simple “off” command.
    That’s powerful.


Popularity: 42% [?]

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Tags: 5 Question Interview · Ruby on Rails · Web 2.0

148 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Yohannes Wijaya (macnatic) // Mar 29, 2007 at 2:26 pm

    Nicely done interview, Josh! it gave a peek on the “inside” of twitter.

  • 2 Josh Kenzer // Mar 29, 2007 at 3:58 pm

    Thanks macnatic. By the way, I know you were running late for your photowalk with Scoble and Thomas Hawk. Did you make it?

  • 3 Martin // Mar 29, 2007 at 4:50 pm

    Nice work!

  • 4 Josh Kenzer // Mar 29, 2007 at 4:54 pm

    Martin, I assume you are complimenting Alex on the nice work of Twitter. I know Alex was deeply involved in the new API released this week including the potential difficulties (and advantages) of using Google Docs.

  • 5 Colin Loretz // Mar 29, 2007 at 5:59 pm

    This is a great look behind the scenes of Twitter, especially for all of the Rubyists out there.

    I started using Twitter yesterday and I like it a lot.

  • 6 Chris Brogan... // Apr 3, 2007 at 6:38 am

    This is truly the most informative piece of blogging on Twitter that I’ve seen to date. I’ve written some how-to stuff, and some social neato stuff, but wow. This was really interesting. A true peak under the kitty cats. Thanks!

  • 7 Grayson // Apr 3, 2007 at 7:42 am

    Great quote: “I don’t think Twitter is a replacement for blogging, just as I don’t
    think blogging is a replacement for journalism.” Kinda sums it all up! Thanks for the interview.

  • 8 Experimenting with CakePHP // Apr 3, 2007 at 8:06 pm

    […] had started writing a Twitter mash-up in Ruby on Rails, but then after my interview with Alex Payne and some tests our IT guys ran in our hosting environment, I was convinced that Ruby is hard to […]

  • 9 stronglist.com » Blog Archive » Twitter and Scaling with Ruby on Rails // Apr 11, 2007 at 1:45 pm

    […] However, its always good to stay informed and know about the issues other developers are facing. Read the whole interview via radicalbehavior Posted by strong Filed in Uncategorized April 11th, […]

  • 10 Ted Leung on the Air » Blog Archive » Who said dynamic language performance doesn’t count? // Apr 11, 2007 at 11:56 pm

    […] the desk of Alex Payne: All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this […]

  • 11 Adrian // Apr 12, 2007 at 8:27 am

    If you’re looking for all of the dynamic-language, rapid-development pleasure of Rails, plus *much* better performance, give Django a shot: djangoproject.com.

  • 12 joestump.net » Blog Archive » Don’t say I didn’t say I told you so // Apr 12, 2007 at 9:13 am

    […] I was fairly convinced that it would make serious scaling a huge pain in the butt. Today, by way of an interview of a Twitter developer, comes the answer I’ve been expecting: Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling […]

  • 13 Lonely Lion » Blog Archive » Twitter on Rails // Apr 12, 2007 at 9:14 am

    […] negative comments about Rails, you instantly get attacked online, right? True, unless you’re a developer for Twitter. Look, I love Rails, I really do, it’s a great framework, it’s fun to use, it’s […]

  • 14 Jay Tuley // Apr 12, 2007 at 10:01 am

    I don’t think the term “syntactical sugar” is what you wanted to use, since the connotation of “syntactical sugar” typically infers not only that the syntax makes it a little easier to do something, but also that the syntax change doesn’t have a performance penalty. Unless you are referring to what others have called “syntactical sugar” and your point is that it isn’t really “syntactical sugar”.

  • 15 Not Another Blog » Blog Archive » Twitter on Rails // Apr 12, 2007 at 11:10 am

    […] Interesting interview with one of Twitter’s developers (see previous post about microblogging). I’ve been wondering how Ruby on Rails scales, i guess this answers that. […]

  • 16 Twitter, Ruby, and Scaling - Laughing Meme // Apr 12, 2007 at 11:25 am

    […] gave a phenomenal interview on Twitter and Rails a couple of weeks ago. This morning its all over the Net — but folks I think are taking the […]

  • 17 Alex Rudloff // Apr 12, 2007 at 11:28 am

    Maybe I can start pointing to this interview to get the Ruby on Rails community to stop trying to force Rails down our throats…

    Great post! ;)

  • 18 Twittering - Brokekid.net // Apr 12, 2007 at 11:39 am

    […] the Blogger Meetup folks that stop through here, I just ran across this article about Alex. I had no idea he joined the Twitter team. Anywho, good luck to […]

  • 19 links for 2007-04-12 « Treat with Jermolene // Apr 12, 2007 at 11:50 am

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne “ll the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise… Ruby is slow.” (tags: ruby twitter rails performance scaling) Posted by jermolene Filed in Uncategorized […]

  • 20 Ruby is slow : agenturblog.de // Apr 12, 2007 at 1:06 pm

    […] einem Interview mit Josh Kenzer lässt Alex Payne,einer der Twitter Developer tief in die Karten der derzeit größen auf Ruby on Rails […]

  • 21 Aaron Johnson » Blog Archive » Communication Multiplexers // Apr 12, 2007 at 1:11 pm

    […] an interview with one of the developers on the twitter.com team: I think the real power of Twitter is its […]

  • 22 Fred // Apr 12, 2007 at 1:21 pm

    I still don’t know exactly what “Ruby on Rails” is? Some guy tried to sell me some last night, said it would get me “high as a mother fucker”. I’m not wearing pants.

  • 23 brosinski.com/stephan » Twitter als Ernstfall für Ruby on Rails // Apr 12, 2007 at 1:24 pm

    […] WebApp Skalierungsprobleme mit sich bringt ist klar. Einer der beteiligten Entwickler bringt in einem Interview durchaus etwas Frust zum Ausdruck: Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - […]

  • 24 The Sound of Crickets Chirping » Blog Archive » Databaselessness, aka RDBMS: The Scalability Punching Bag // Apr 12, 2007 at 1:38 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne View blog reactions […]

  • 25 Gunnard // Apr 12, 2007 at 2:03 pm

    Its interesting to hear someone talk about a language that is slow and not talk about how to better do it in a faster language. I am talking about php/python. Would Twitter be better off running on a more “mainstream” system? Just a thought - don’t kill me ;)

  • 26 Peter Cooper // Apr 12, 2007 at 2:23 pm

    I’m not entirely buying the Ruby speed argument. Sure, we know Ruby is slower than other languages, but when dealing with the Web, databases, etc, it really doesn’t matter unless you need to do some serious processing.. which hardly any Web app does.

    Put it this way, I’ve taken some reasonably well performing Perl daemon code I have that serves hundreds of millons of requests per month, and managed to port it to Ruby and make it even faster.. so I’m just not buying that Ruby’s performance is really an issue with Web applications.

  • 27 Gunnard // Apr 12, 2007 at 2:30 pm

    Peter:
    So what is the argument then for a language? Comfort? Given that the speed of web apps is neg-lable, one should program in any language they choose? I started out in perl and understand that perl can be 100% awesome vs a PHP hack or something. How about the (sorry) fastCGI issue? doesn’t that hinder the performance of the web app? I am sorry to just call that out but if it is an issue then I must. This is not a disagreement but a debate, please contribute to it, anyone ;)

  • 28 Peter Cooper // Apr 12, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    My personal opinion is that languages can win and lose on factors like the quality of libraries, quality of deployment systems (case in point, mod_php vs everything else), ability of the language to interface with other things, qualit of frameworks, etc. Those things are related to the ecosystem of a language rather than the core performance of the language per-se.

  • 29 Megginson Technologies: Quoderat » Blog Archive » Ruby on Rails pain at Twitter // Apr 12, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    […] Kenzer has posted an interview with Alex Payne, a developer for Twitter, which is one of (if not the) biggest Ruby on Rails-based web apps. A […]

  • 30 Jamie Pitts // Apr 12, 2007 at 3:10 pm

    I appreciate the honesty in this interview.

    I just soft-launched my rails-based video tracker and I am using the caching all over the place. It is easy to do and every rails developer should put it in before launching.

    The language is amazingly cool to develop in, and rails saves a lot of time even if the data modelling approach is somewhat simplistic. But I can definitely see a performance difference between ruby and languages such as perl, php, and even java.

    As with everything in engineering, you have to deal with difficult trade-offs. With Memecat, I chose to pay for coding happiness with more processor heat and server memory.

  • 31 Texas Startup Blog: Web 2.0 and Social Media » Blog Archive » Twitter blaming Ruby on Rails for failures? // Apr 12, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    […] placing the blame squarly on the Ruby on Rails framework.  Alex explains in an interview with Josh Kezner, It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at […]

  • 32 lojic.com » Blog Archive » Twitter is built with Ruby on Rails // Apr 12, 2007 at 7:35 pm

    […] researching it recently. This post on DHH’s blog informed me of that. The entry references an interview with a Twitter developer about their scaling issues. By various metrics Twitter is the biggest […]

  • 33 Jim O'Connell // Apr 12, 2007 at 8:49 pm

    You really should have limited his responses to 140 characters.

    Great interview.

  • 34 tecosystems » links for 2007-04-13 // Apr 12, 2007 at 10:34 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne “It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it’s tough.” (tags: via:Ted Ruby performance dynamiclanguages Twitter Rails) […]

  • 35 People Over Process » Blog Archive » links for 2007-04-13 // Apr 13, 2007 at 12:25 am

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne (tags: ruby rails twitter performance) […]

  • 36 Twitter Admits: Ruby On Rails Can’t Scale at Brandon Werner // Apr 13, 2007 at 3:55 am

    […] (Link via Daring Fireball) Sphere: Related Content […]

  • 37 Wow! Traffic Surges // Apr 13, 2007 at 6:34 am

    […] had 6,160 visitors to my blog…yesterday! Most the traffic is to read the interview with Twitter developer Alex Payne. The second most popular is the post about experimenting with […]

  • 38 lucasjosh.com » Blog Archive » Twitter, Rails and Scaling // Apr 13, 2007 at 7:02 am

    […] little tempest in a teapot the past day or so has been the interview Twitter developer, Alex Payne did. In it, he somewhat calls out Rails for some of the performance […]

  • 39 hughmcguire.net · scaling ruby on rails // Apr 13, 2007 at 8:41 am

    […] Twitter is apparently the busiest Rails site on the net, and here is what they have to say about it: 2. How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load? By various metrics […]

  • 40 Dave Brondsema // Apr 13, 2007 at 11:08 am

    Re: #2 — Acts As Partitioned http://partitioned.rubyforge.org/

  • 41 Mario Ceste // Apr 13, 2007 at 11:13 am

    I would argue that Revolution Health, http://www.revolutionhealth.com is a larger site that Twitter.

  • 42 Bronte Media » Ruby on Rails // Apr 13, 2007 at 12:56 pm

    […] one of the Twitter developers, whose app is peaking 11,000 requests per second at the […]

  • 43 Ricardo Galli, de software libre » Los problemas Twitter (y la escalibilidad) // Apr 13, 2007 at 1:04 pm

    […] tema viene del artículo y debate Twitter Problem, surgido a raíz de una entrevista a Alex Payne, uno de los desarrolladores de Twitter. Me llamó muchísimo la […]

  • 44 rascunho » Blog Archive » links for 2007-04-13 // Apr 13, 2007 at 1:18 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne I came to Rails after working in PHP like many developers, but I’ve never been a language purist. (tags: http://www.radicalbehavior.com 2007 at_tecp rails ruby_on_rails entrevista blog_post twitter) […]

  • 45 Baron VC » Blog Archive » links for 2007-04-13 // Apr 13, 2007 at 1:21 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne The developer of Twitter talks scaling. (tags: twitter startups) […]

  • 46 JustAnOutsider // Apr 13, 2007 at 6:38 pm

    @Adrian Holovaty: Dude, this is so lame. Is this all you guys can do? look for disaffected companies and try to pitch your framework? almost like ambulance chasing..

    @Peter: Dear Pete, Ruby is slow, it eats CPU for breakfast, and please show us your million hits per month code. I’m sure its proprietary and you can’t show it to us.

    Rails is braindamaged when it comes to scaling. Reason? It was developed by an MIS/Marketing student with delusions of programming grandeur. DHH doesn’t know his RDBMS from his buttocks! And that’s the godawful truth.

    And now he’s squirming like a little you know who, because the rubber is hitting the road, and the thing doesn’t scale on the DB end. Well, this is what you get when you don’t understand the issues involved, and bitchslap anyone who brings them up in the initial phases in the name of “opinionation”.

    Don’t know what will come, maybe it will be an Erlang framework (No Thanks ErlyWeb, you’re just as ugly as rails, but we can be hi-bye friends..) or seaside or whatever.. but something is going to really cut rails and all its hype down a few notches (despite all the efforts of the blogocircuit talking heads milking the hell out of php-converts)

    No Wonder PragProg is offering an Erlang book to seed a “new wave” of “pragmatic” cash-cow-milking, but hey, you can never blame an entrepreneur.. especially a pragmatic one.

    Al3x, I hope DHH and 37S don’t get you fired from this, because what you’re dealing with is a sleazy marketing machine wrapping itself up in the post-rape sheets of opensource. They don’t like it when people mess with their revenue streams and their little conference-filling cash cow called “Ruby on Rails”

  • 47 Bob On Development » Ruby on Rails Hits a Wall; Twitter Stutters // Apr 13, 2007 at 8:58 pm

    […] to this interview with a developer at Twitter, that site is currently the largest Ruby on Rails site in operation […]

  • 48 Peter Cooper // Apr 14, 2007 at 4:22 am

    JustAnOutside: It’s not all proprietary, but I don’t need to show it either. Just rig up a basic script that uses Mongrel (at library level) and returns stuff cached in Memcached, and you’ll easily hit 700m~1bn requests per month on a single box. It takes half an hour to run up such a test. Ruby is almost irrelevant in this example as the amount of processing to send stuff to HTTP clients is minimal.

    Then it all comes down to what percentage of requests have to hit a database or do some sort of logic, but as long as it’s under a certain percentage, you’re good.

  • 49 Peter Cooper // Apr 14, 2007 at 4:23 am

    Note, I’m not talking about Rails.. which is slow. I’m talking about actually developing your own stuff with Ruby. My argument is that Ruby’s speed is nearly irrelevant when it comes to fielding data between databases and networks.. since databases and networks are always slower than Ruby! (but not Rails)

  • 50 Twitter & Rails: Hiccups Today, Proven Scalibility Tomorrow « Better Software. Better Science. Better S*. // Apr 14, 2007 at 12:21 pm

    […] Software at 11:21 am by mj It’s been a fun week. Two weeks ago, Twitter developer Alex Payne gave a short interview, in which he talked about Twitter’s scaling issues. The money quote: Running on Rails has […]

  • 51 JustAnOutsider // Apr 14, 2007 at 12:48 pm

    @PeterCooper: Agreed. Ruby’s speed is almost irrelevant, though it does affect the overall performance of an app especially through a framework which adds layers of abstraction (for developer productivity no doubt but still).

    A general comment:

    My general point is that Rails was not developed with performance in mind, which is very typical of run-of-the-mill developers, DHH being no exception. He created something which made sense to him and his rather superficial understanding of the performance issues and that is just as well. But let us not forget that DHH’s major problem while creating BASECAMP was _NOT_ performance and scaling, but Time to Market, and rails did that beautifully _for them_ It doesn’t mean DHH or rails community should start pretending it will work in all situations because Rails is beauty this and joy that and it just fits their brains and all that new-agey non-sense that DHH tries to spread all the time.

    My issue is with 37S and gang protecting RoR as a corporate brand without stating it in so many words, and attacking even their most valued customers (RoR users are the other side of the Brand coin) who are in reality helping to test the framework to its limits.

    They are not going to get far with this type of attitude attacking someone and accusing them of being lazy if the users dare to point out some deficiencies in the framework which are well known in the community to begin with.

    DHH hints that multi-database solutions are possible with rails without offering so much as a link. If they are and a team running an 11k hps site doesn’t know it, then they should all be summarily fired! but I’m quite sure that is not the case and this is just another technical nit-picking by DHH in a tranparent attempt to save face.

    Ruby is almost equivalent to PHP speedwise (without all the crap) , and if stupid-pet-tricks are kept to a minimum (or at least made optional), there is no reason Ruby based web applications cannot scale to the same size that most PHP/Perl mega-sites do ( WikiPedia, Craigslist come to mind)

    The problem is that Rails makes it very easy to make the commitment on the front-end of the project which is the design and development part, but once you hit the critical size, and have hundreds of thousands of users it just becomes a Monkey on your back!.

    I don’t agree with the sentiment that Twitter should be thankful to RoR team for giving them a framework which got them to 11k hps. If you fail primarily and specifically because of your choice of framework not scaling, the failure is just as bad as failing in the beginning. If I hyped up and gave (for free) NASA a rocket with a claim it would take their astronauts to the moon and land them and bring them back, but it only took them to moon orbit where they were stuck, should NASA be thankful to me for FUCKING UP the mission? Should I chide NASA by presenting the fact that the rocket “at least” took them to the moon? whoopty frikking do.

    Given these constraints, it is best to do your initial demos and early version in RoR, but you better have contingency plans for when you hit critical mass because things will become extremely painful even if you DO have the VC cash to throw at the beast.

    I happened to invite quite a few people when twitter was having these performance problems and most of them refused to join or even go back there based on their initial impression of the slowness of the site. How that critical-user-mass loss figures in as total strategic loss for Twitter remains to be seen, but one thing is clear, the choice of RoR would have played a key part in that if we were to quantify the reasons for Twitter’s success or failure. Things are still touch and go for them, as they always are for most startups.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter was seriously looking into a rewrite in pure Ruby or perhaps another framework . Django Dev’ comments would have very little to do with it, but if I was Twitter, I’d be looking to cut my losses - these are business decisions and once you get to that size, your loyalties change. You may love Ruby, but I bet you’d really love that million dollar check in your pocket if you could pull it off, and if RoR stood in your way, you’d know what to do.

    I doubt they’d go the Python route, because the rework overhead would be just too risky. Unless of course they pull a reddit as it were.

    The only thing that can save Rails is a fork with some people with good grasp of SDLC (including deployment and operations) at the helm.

    Perhaps it should be called Ruby on Brains.

  • 52 Twitter starting to get de-Railed » Thinking Outloud // Apr 14, 2007 at 3:30 pm

    […] has been on a fast ride lately, getting lots of attention from various bloggers. The interview with Alex Payne from Twitter (which I found via Brandon Werner’s post) has really exposed Ruby on Rails current […]

  • 53 Twitter is Slow, but not because of Ruby | FuCoder.com // Apr 14, 2007 at 11:12 pm

    […] Alex stated it clearly in the Twitter interview that database has been the bottleneck, just like most share-nothing web development platform that […]

  • 54 Julian On Software » Twitter on Rails / Alex Payne: “Ruby is Slow” // Apr 14, 2007 at 11:20 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne “there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.” […]

  • 55 Twitter: real life ruby on rails performance | My Stuff // Apr 15, 2007 at 5:58 am

    […] site has massive scaling problems, to the tune of 11,000 pageviews per second. According to this interview with a Twitter developer, a lot of the scaling problems are attributable to Twitter’s choice of platform: By various […]

  • 56 dmiessler.com | grep understanding knowledge // Apr 15, 2007 at 8:38 am

    […] Link: Interview With Twitter Dev […]

  • 57 Around the web | alexking.org // Apr 15, 2007 at 10:59 am

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  • 58 Gluttonous : On Twitter, Rails, and Community // Apr 15, 2007 at 1:25 pm

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  • 59 Balance On Rails // Apr 15, 2007 at 1:30 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne Apr 13 […]

  • 60 AndrewWeeblsoi // Apr 15, 2007 at 2:01 pm

    I really think you should refrain from bragging about how awesome Rails scales, until you figure out how to make Twitter work reliably over 99 percent of the time. Twitter is as slow as constipation for me.

  • 61 Jengates Blog » links for 2007-04-15 // Apr 15, 2007 at 4:28 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne (tags: scalability ruby rails) […]

  • 62 Rails woes. The slow that is keeping twitter down. » Harper Reed: Tech, Phones, Yo-yoing and Death Metal // Apr 15, 2007 at 11:03 pm

    […] the other day, one of the twitter engineers had a really great interview about twitter, their growth and their future. It is very insightful and covers some interesting ground. It is […]

  • 63 BlogAllAlong » Twitter suffering from Ruby on Rails Performance // Apr 16, 2007 at 3:24 am

    […] is a nice interview with one of the developers of Twitter, talking about the issues they face with Ruby on Rails when […]

  • 64 infobong.com » linkdump for 2007.04.16 // Apr 16, 2007 at 12:17 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne This interview reveals some of the new features Twitter may have in store, but also that the service is struggling to keep up with its growth. (del.icio.us tags: Twitter Web2.0 chat interview) […]

  • 65 david sidlinger » Blog Archive » Scaling Rails // Apr 16, 2007 at 4:16 pm

    […] at rc3.org posted about an interview with Twitter developer Alex Payne where he discusses some of the problems with scaling Rails-based […]

  • 66 James Governor’s Monkchips » links for 2007-04-16 // Apr 16, 2007 at 4:34 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne Read the original article, not just DHH’s comments on it. its interesting. (tags: Twitter Joyent scale) This entry was written by jgovernor and posted on April 16, 2007 at 11:32 pm and filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « Colgate starts Wal*Mart style Co-Innovation Model At SAP […]

  • 67 Bieber Labs » links for 2007-04-17 // Apr 16, 2007 at 8:21 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne “I reached out to one of the developers on the Twitter team and asked if he would answer 5 questions. Alex not only answered them but is very honest and up front with his answers.” (tags: architecture scaling twitter rails ruby performance rubyonrails) […]

  • 68 On scaling, performance, and realism - Warpspire // Apr 16, 2007 at 11:09 pm

    […] there’s been a whole hubaloo about Rails (Alex, David, and even Mark) ’scaling,’ ‘performance’ and egos flying rampant. […]

  • 69 tOMPSON’s blog » Blog Archive » Twitter, Scaling problems and Rails // Apr 17, 2007 at 1:27 pm

    […] Atwood has an interesting post about massive scaling problems of twitter. In an interview a developer of twitter said that: By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now. Running on […]

  • 70 Nicholas Wright // Apr 17, 2007 at 1:56 pm

    @JustAnOutsider: Jesus, I’m glad somebody finally took the time to type that up.

  • 71 DHH Arrogant? Maybe. But make sure to catch his point » Thursday Night // Apr 17, 2007 at 2:24 pm

    […] been a lot of news lately regarding Alex Payne of Twitter’s interview regarding Ruby on Rails and Twitter’s performance problems, and more about the creator of […]

  • 72 Twitter hits the Rails wall « CodeHappy // Apr 17, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    […] RadicalBehavior.com recently published an interview with a developer on the Twitter team. Much as I hate Twitter as an application, they are the world’s largest (in terms of concurrent users and requests processed a second) Ruby on Rails website. Most interesting to me is that they have been hitting the same walls in performance with their app that we’ve had to plough through recently at PayPerPost. […]

  • 73 lucas // Apr 18, 2007 at 12:02 am

    Ruby and Rails are very high level languages and as such are slow. Ruby is slow and and Rails to that and it’s even slower. Thank you for affirming this!

    What Rails is suitable for is small apps. If you’re a web design firm with a small client, use Rails. It’ll get you up and running fast, but if you want performance and have a realistic chance at gaining millions of users, you have to use lower level languages.

    The proliferation of frameworks means in general that sites will come out faster but run slower. Great for prototyping but not so good for deploying.

    However, if you believe in agile programming then you do deal with problems when they come up, not before. So until you get to be as big as twitter, you can act like you’re designing for, say, a 100,000 users.

  • 74 lucas // Apr 18, 2007 at 12:11 am

    everybody stick with PHP we’ll all be better off!

  • 75 Flickertracks » Blog Archive » links for 2007-04-18 // Apr 18, 2007 at 11:23 am

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne Title says it all. More stuff about the phenomenon of Twitter. (tags: twitter developer interview) […]

  • 76 What I accidently learnt about programming » Open source Scaling Ruby vs PHP // Apr 19, 2007 at 1:30 am

    […] has been a lot of talk in the blogsphere about scaling. Most of this have been caused by an interview with Alex Payne where he discusses the problems they have had with scaling up twitter. After […]

  • 77 Twitter use case #1! at david ascher // Apr 19, 2007 at 12:53 pm

    […] I just need them to publish data. Next season, if Twitter is still in business (and hasn’t collapsed under the load), I might just print out some stickers and plaster them in the […]

  • 78 Friction(less) Rails « Shebanation // Apr 19, 2007 at 3:54 pm

    […] story of Twitter with quite a bit of interest. There was a bit of a flap recently when Josh Kenzer interviewed Twitter’s Alex Payne. Alex made some statements about the pain of doing very large scale scaling with Ruby on Rails that […]

  • 79 I wanna spend all your money … » Blog Archive » Marc Pilgrim translating PR speak of RubyOnRails architect // Apr 20, 2007 at 7:39 am

    […] today I found an Interview by one of the Twitter developers who talks about Rails (Twitter is built on Rails). He summarizes the problems that Rails has when […]

  • 80 rockpepper.com » Blog Archive » Rails c’est bien mais… // Apr 20, 2007 at 2:41 pm

    […] C’est pas moi qui le dit, c’est Alex Payne, un des développeurs de Twitter : 5 Questions Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne. Et la discussion est mouvementée sur le blog du créateur de […]

  • 81 Por que usar Ruby On Rails? Convencendo eu, você e seu cachorro de que vale a pena investir seu tempo sobre trilhos « agaeleblog // Apr 20, 2007 at 8:02 pm

    […] dar uns bons exemplos de grandes projetos robustos e estáveis (não cite em hipótese alguma os problemas do Twitter) e procurar exemplos de outras empresas grandes que usam e recomendam Rails . Seria bom destacar […]

  • 82 What I accidently learnt about programming » Twitter performance DB vs Filesystem // Apr 21, 2007 at 3:24 am

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne […]

  • 83 The folly of ignoring scaling « The other side of the firewall // Apr 22, 2007 at 9:22 pm

    […] Sixteen months later, in an interview, Twitter Developer Alex Payne says: Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now. Running […]

  • 84 Andrew Grumet’s Weblog » Blog Archive » // Apr 22, 2007 at 11:20 pm

    […] developer Alex Payne on Rails scalability: “Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly […]

  • 85 webforth » Blog Archive » Scaling Twitter to the maximum // Apr 23, 2007 at 7:31 am

    […] Twitter is this years success story. With millions of twits from millions of users, it has been reported that is struggling to scale. David posted couple of thuoghts over this issues in general last […]

  • 86 Scaling and Uptime « François Schiettecatte’s Blog // Apr 24, 2007 at 9:31 am

    […] then follows up with an except from an interview with a Twitter developer Alex Payne who says: Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right […]

  • 87 Twitter Community // Apr 25, 2007 at 8:19 pm

    We have linked you your article. Nice interview.

    The Unofficial Twitter Community and Forums
    http://www.twittown.com

  • 88 My Twitter Account Deleted, Restored // Apr 27, 2007 at 1:03 am

    […] not saying a word about scalability and Ruby On Rails, either. But as one of (or the) largest Ruby on Rails applications on the web, a lot of people are keeping an eye on how it […]

  • 89 TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » 行方不明だった私のTwitterアカウント、無事復活 // Apr 27, 2007 at 10:03 am

    […] 私はRuby On Railsやスケーラビリティーについては評価を控えているが、Twitterはおそらく最大クラス(いや、もう最大かもしれない)のRuby on Railsアプリケーションであるため、そのスケーラビリティーの面にかなり注目が集まっている。 […]

  • 90 spotstory » Some other truths about Ruby on Rails // Apr 27, 2007 at 10:59 am

    […] pointed me to Josh Kenzer’s interview last month with Twitter Developer Alex Payne.  The newsworthy bit is that Alex states that […]

  • 91 Terminally Incoherent » Blog Archive » Ruby on Rails doesn’t Scale Well // Apr 27, 2007 at 11:01 am

    […] seems that their issue is not the execution speed, but the Rails design itself. In a recent interview a Twitter developer Alex Payne said: The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that […]

  • 92 joelle // Apr 28, 2007 at 9:53 am

    Nice to see such a heavy site developed on ruby on rails. Eventhough I am not exactly sure what to do with twitter. :)

  • 93 sqeez // Apr 28, 2007 at 1:01 pm

    very interesting “frank” advice about rails. here’s hoping one day we’ll be there as well.

  • 94 links for 2007-04-30 « Zero influence // Apr 29, 2007 at 5:27 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne Asking the question about scalability to which we’ve known the answer. I smell a rebuild soon. (tags: applications architecture twitter rails ruby performance scaling scalability) […]

  • 95 ::lemonup::News, Technology, sports, cars, movie, video, blog, travel, mp3, picture, computer, notebook » My Twitter Account Deleted, Restored // Apr 30, 2007 at 11:04 pm

    […] not saying a word about scalability and Ruby On Rails, either. But as one of (or the) largest Ruby on Rails applications on the web, a lot of people are keeping an eye on how it […]

  • 96 Clunky Flow » Scalability, Ruby On Rails and Twitter // May 1, 2007 at 2:14 am

    […] they have discovered via the experience of deploying the world’s biggest Ruby on Rails app. here All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends […]

  • 97 Impersonation Failure : Silverlight, DLR and other MIX07 Announcements // May 1, 2007 at 5:18 am

    […] Heel, performance, something that big RoR sites like Twitter are facing. (See the interesting Alex Payne Interview for more on how they had to cope with massive scaling issues at […]

  • 98 Turulcsirip - blumi // May 4, 2007 at 12:23 am

    […] on Rails illúziórombolás: http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twitter-developer-alex-payne/ blumi — 2007. 05. 04. […]

  • 99 Oh sure, RoR will scale..." « Web Dev’s Head // May 4, 2007 at 11:51 am

    […] Web Dev’s Head In here, it’s too dark to read « Jogging at gunpoint… “Oh sure, RoR will scale…” May 4th, 2007 From an interview on Radical Behavior: […]

  • 100 Spazidigitali - ITA | Twitter vs Italiani // May 5, 2007 at 7:18 am

    […] quando questa intervista ha acceso gli animi attorno al tema della scalabilita di rails ho atteso di vedere la […]

  • 101 Link Comeith and Goeith // May 9, 2007 at 8:32 am

    […] something interesting today. Apparently this week, the Wikipedia article on Twitter linked to my 5 question interview with Twitter developer Alex Payne under the References section. When I went to check out the link, I found it has been removed. I […]

  • 102 rjordan // May 10, 2007 at 3:27 pm

    Sounds like ruby/rails was fast enough to expose the un-scaleability of underlying database framework. I would suggest you first determine if your DBA is doing his job, if he is, it shouldn’t be that difficult to create an activerecord adapter that uses a connection pool to serve queries. Thus making it possible to use multiple backend databases yet still be transparent or at least mostly transparent to your application.

  • 103 Same shirt every day » Blog Archive » Hello world! // May 12, 2007 at 12:24 pm

    […] rich are in motion and of course I’m writing in Rails in my spare time. All of a sudden, a scare article comes out claming Rails to be a slow dog… or dog slow… or both. I panic and decide to […]

  • 104 The Soapbox » Ruby-on-Rails (Ror) vs PHP // May 13, 2007 at 11:36 pm

    […] folks at Twitter recently expressed their difficulties in scaling with RoR - check this and this. They faced moderate backlash from the RoR development community and I consider that to be fairly […]

  • 105 vaspers the grate // May 16, 2007 at 8:38 am

    I embedded my employer’s blog that I customized from a template, rather than my Vaspers the Grate blog, because my employer is thinking about converting from PHP5 to Ruby on Rails for our small to medium business web design/hosting clients.

    If anyone has such transition experience, from PHP5 to RoR, in a Linux, Agile, MySQL environment, please contact me.

    Thanks.

  • 106 Flickr & Twitter On Asynchronicity | These go to eleven // May 16, 2007 at 8:59 am

    […] message passing with Jabber to help decouple the components in their systems as they tackle their very well documented scaling issues. A lot of my day to day is concerned with enabling our own platform […]

  • 107 johnswords.com » Scaling Twitter. Jaiku is FaceBook, Twitter is MySpace // May 16, 2007 at 6:03 pm

    […] can hear Alex Payne talk about scaling Twitter on the 5 Questions Podcast and there might possibly be some audio from Blain Cook’s presentation at SD Forum a couple of […]

  • 108 MarkSu’s Blog » Blog Archive » Twitter Performance Problems? Time for a fabric? // May 19, 2007 at 7:23 am

    […] an Interesting blog entry by Josh Kenzer - 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne Alex points out that twitter was built using Ruby on Rails and has run into some Rails database […]

  • 109 The Woodwork » Blog Archive » Is Ruby the dog and PHP the dogfood? // May 21, 2007 at 12:13 pm

    […] Twitter may be at 700, but it’s a great product and it’s probably the largest Rails installation on the internet. Before that it was…what was it? Oh yeah! If I were James Duncan Davidson, I’d be fellating al3x right now for proving that Rails can scale (if you rip out all the tuff that makes Rails attractive in the first place). […]

  • 110 Language war: real stuff « My half-life2 // May 22, 2007 at 7:27 pm

    […] with Ruby on Rails for speedy developement and easier maintainability in mind. Then the twitter debate came up and people spoke about the scalability and other issues with RoR. Now he is thinking of […]

  • 111 Designer Labels Verus Solid Brands - Is The Web Development Loosing the Plot? « Mark Curphey - SecurityBuddha.com // May 25, 2007 at 6:45 am

    […] Designer Labels Verus Solid Brands - Is The Web Development Loosing the Plot? Alex Hutton sent me an interesting mail with some links to some heated debate about Ruby on Rails and Twitter. I followed the trail back across various tirades about PHP, Rails and eventually to this article. […]

  • 112 Websenat » Interview mit Twitter Developer Alex Payne // May 26, 2007 at 7:17 am

    […] immer langsamer. Das Interview mit dem Twitter-Developer Alex Payne zeigt aber eine Lösung: 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne von RaymaN | Allgemein | Trackback | RSS […]

  • 113 Websenat » Interview mit Twitter Developer Alex Payne // May 27, 2007 at 11:48 am

    […] immer langsamer. Das Interview mit dem Twitter-Developer Alex Payne zeigt aber eine Lösung: 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne Sociable Bookmarks: Diese Icons verzweigen auf soziale Netzwerke bei denen Nutzer neue Inhalte […]

  • 114 The Tech Behind Web 2.0: Is Rails Really the Future? // May 28, 2007 at 6:54 am

    […] for me, not really understanding how Rails works. I do know that when I read things like the interview with Alex Payne from March, I wonder if Rails, and even PHP are the future of Web […]

  • 115 Web2.0 Effect Blog Web 2.0 Blog Technology Help » Blog Archive » The Tech Behind Web 2.0: Is Rails Really the Future? // May 28, 2007 at 6:55 am

    […] for me, not really understanding how Rails works. I do know that when I read things like the interview with Alex Payne from March, I wonder if Rails, and even PHP, are the future of Web […]

  • 116 Da Twitter a Jaiku KromeBlog - il blog di Sergio Longoni // May 29, 2007 at 3:05 pm

    […] e momenti di solitudine causati dalla mancata sincronizzazione delle timeline e soprattutto dopo le tutt’altro che rassicuranti parole di un programmatore della piattaforma penso sia arrivato il momento di cominciare a guardarsi […]

  • 117 Jeff McNeill » Blog Archive » links for 2007-06-04 // Jun 4, 2007 at 6:19 am

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne Mar 2007 (tags: twitter rails scaling) […]

  • 118 Why Rails is going to be better (* than PHP) ? « Blogging Rails // Jun 6, 2007 at 7:33 am

    […] on June 6th, 2007. The Ruby on Rails blogosphere has been buzzing a lot lately with Twitter’s interview and their woes with scaling Twitter. Than over at Terry’s, he reignited the fire with by saying “Is Ruby the dog and PHP […]

  • 119 Fredrik Holmstrom.se » Blog Archive » Läsvärt AKA dagens länkskörd // Jun 7, 2007 at 5:14 am

    […] Interview with Twitter developer Alex Payne […]

  • 120 The gang Of BS » Blog Archive » Ruby on Rails visto da uno sviluppatore J2EE // Jun 8, 2007 at 4:02 am

    […] e scalabilità: In produzione bisogna usare FASTCgi (sì i vecchi cgi tornano in auge) e RoR sembra non scalare bene ( e non lo dico […]

  • 121 eConectados » Twitter moviéndose a Django (Python) // Jun 13, 2007 at 1:45 am

    […] (si tuviera un servidor privado quizás cambiaría de idea). Hace ya 2 meses que hicieron una entrevista a este desarrollador de Twitter, Alex Payne; y se montó una buena discusión en el blog de Ricardo Galli que en resumen criticaba […]

  • 122 BrainFuel » Chris’ Weekend Links - June 16th // Jun 16, 2007 at 12:01 pm

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne — A good read. (Via Ryan Thrash) […]

  • 123 An Interview with a Twitter Developer at Candyjar - David Ward // Jun 18, 2007 at 2:30 am

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne Bookmark to: […]

  • 124 The infrastructure of presence at Like It Matters // Jul 9, 2007 at 12:08 pm

    […] make it they’ll be in a highly defensible position, because real-time presence is (as their recent woes have demonstrated) *really freaking […]

  • 125 startups, technology and innovation » Programming language choices for entrepreneurs // Jul 17, 2007 at 6:00 am

    […] don’t know enough about Rails to judge it’s worth. I do know that Rails may have problems scaling. I also know that you can’t hire a Rails developer in Seattle for love or […]

  • 126 links for 2007-07-31 « membo // Jul 31, 2007 at 1:20 am

    […] 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne (tags: rails twitter) […]

  • 127 Shanti’s Dispatches - Open Source Carpetbaggers’ Entitlement Mentality // Aug 1, 2007 at 6:37 pm

    […] lately it seems like frameworks and apps (see comments) can’t catch a break. (there are other examples, i.e. people bitching […]

  • 128 How to Drive Traffic from "Twitter"? // Aug 4, 2007 at 3:38 am

    […] weblog: two weeks on twitter 72. twitter - Web2.0List 73. Twitter Gets Their Venture Round 74. 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne 75. Scaling Twitter - Railsconf 2007 » SlideShare 76. *michael parekh on IT*: ON TWITTER’S […]

  • 129 PHP Did Not Cause Facebook Code Leakage at Random Strings // Aug 13, 2007 at 4:33 pm

    […] only fantisize about. If PHP coders were building their applications on a platform pre-destined for Twitter-like failures, no doubt we’d have heard about it by […]

  • 130 :// dharmalog » twitter/al3x: “the real power of Twitter” // Aug 16, 2007 at 6:55 am

    […] bookmarks + recentes (del.icio.us/nandop) � 5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne � How to publish your Facebook status to Twitter � TwitterBuzz - The most popular links on Twitter […]

  • 131 Parveen Kaler » Blog Archive » FogBugz World Tour: Vancouver // Sep 6, 2007 at 12:32 am

    […] Joel could have thumbed his nose, stuck out his tongue, and can say, “Neener, neener, neener” everytime Twitter goes down [1, 2]. […]

  • 132 Twitter on Rails | tactical web development // Sep 10, 2007 at 2:35 pm

    […] von Rails Alex Payne, einer der Twitter-Entwickler, entschloß sich damals, mit seinem Unmut an die Öffentlichkeit zu gehen. Seine Aussage, daß Rails zwar nett zu programmieren sei, sich wohl aber kaum zur Skalierung für […]

  • 133 DuperMag » Archivo » Ruby on Rails: después del hype // Sep 27, 2007 at 12:48 pm

    […] escala. Y si lo presionas de más se tropesará y se quedará catatónico.. O como dijera mejor el mismo Alex Payne ( desarrollador de Twitter) […]

  • 134 Planetfrank » Blog Archive » ruby vs php // Sep 28, 2007 at 1:02 am

    […] nos habla de la experiencia de Alex Payne (desarrollador de Twitter) y de Derek Sivers (de CDBaby). los dos parecen quejarse de la escalabilidad de este lenguaje. derek […]

  • 135 Rob Conery » Imploding Rails, Jesus DHH, and The Uncle Ben Principle // Oct 10, 2007 at 8:06 pm

    […] damn happy. As we all know, Twitter is having problems - Alex Payne, one of the Twitter Developers, discusses this at length (emphasis mine): Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now. Running on Rails has […]

  • 136 Rails…are you going to be a roadblock? | so I was thinking… // Oct 14, 2007 at 9:23 am

    […] on this problem right now. CDBABY creator went to Rails and BACK TO PHP. Twitter is running into performance issue as they scale. It seems all the “magic” of rails of hiding the crap you do not what to […]

  • 137 DDT-MODELS // Oct 18, 2007 at 5:08 pm

    Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV

  • 138 DDT-MODELS // Oct 21, 2007 at 2:47 am

    Because of your work, so many people can work together, so many people have discover each other than you open a new world of communication between people.

  • 139 Ruby-On-Rails or PHP? | Jupiter Labs Blog // Oct 21, 2007 at 1:52 pm

    […] the fall of Rails, written by Rob Connery. Read the part where he is talking about the problems Twitter currently has, he says: “looks like Twitter is riding Rails right off a cliff”. Rob […]

  • 140 DDT-WEBKINZ // Oct 22, 2007 at 10:54 pm

    You own my respect and gratitude. Thanks to your hard labour and persistance we have a magnificent web and together with other standards an easy to use enviroment. Thank you!

  • 141 גיקים, פודקאסט מספר 28 - "I'm Youre Biggest Flan" | גיקים - פודקאסט שבועי | Geekim - Weekly Podcast // Oct 30, 2007 at 4:08 am

    […] המתחרים העיקריים; אחד המפתחים מדבר בגילוי לב מפתיע על הקשיים בגידול יישומים שמבוססים על Ruby On Rails; בהודעות השגיאה של טוויטר מככבים מגוון חתולים, במיטב […]

  • 142 6 Reasons Why I Use CakePHP Instead of Ruby On Rails | Web Development 2.0: Web Design, CakePHP, Javascript // Nov 26, 2007 at 9:19 am

    […] one of the developers of Twitter (huge RoR application) has expressed concern about RoR’s performance. For the rest of us of us on shared hosts or who write small/medium sized applications for clients […]

  • 143 CakePHP/PHP versus Ruby on Rails/Ruby: Coding Languages, a developer's new girlfriend // Nov 29, 2007 at 4:32 am

    […] big debate about Ruby on Rails versus PHP was set off by Alex Payne of Twitter’s complaint about the speed of RoR in an interview: All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure […]

  • 144 dirkmeister.de » Blog Archive » Skalierbarkeit und “Ruby on Rails” // Dec 3, 2007 at 8:47 am

    […] hier gar nicht mit dem Sinn und Unsinn von Twitter beschäftigen, sondern ich möchte mich auf ein aufschlussreiches Interview mit dem Twitter-Entwickler Alex Payne verweisen in dem es auch um die Skalierbarkeit von Rails geht. In dem Interview heisst […]

  • 145 Large sites using Ruby on Rails « Microserf // Dec 12, 2007 at 4:40 am

    […] Wednesday, December 12, 2007 I read the newspaper Computer Sweden today, and there was an article about how Ruby on Rails is getting thumbs up from major projects. It was very interesting, since one of the main cons of the framework is how it doesn’t scale very well. […]

  • 146 see a puffin eat a fish » Scaling in Rails // Dec 12, 2007 at 9:11 am

    […] friend Claude pointed me to this interview with the Twitter developers regarding their Rails scaling issues. Not surprisingly, you can throw […]

  • 147   Voip & Twitter by CoolTV // Dec 17, 2007 at 4:27 am

    […] http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twitter-developer-alex-payne/ […]

  • 148 Ian’s Blog » Scala: the best of both Ruby and Java // Dec 18, 2007 at 3:33 pm

    […] requiring over 15 times as long to perform a CPU-intensive task as Java (and this has caused real life problems for some Ruby […]

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