Scaling microblogging services such as Twitter
There’s a joke in the Ruby and Rails world that says ‘Rails doesn’t scale’, which it’s just a joke to really say: what is scallable is the way you create your app, and that does not depend whether is written in Rails, Perl or even Bash.
So it’s important to know what matters in terms of building a scallable web app. As you know:
Scalability: ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged.
And how do you accomplish that in Ruby/Rails/whatever app you’re writing?
Well, one way to gain further knowledge on the subject is by reading this article. The author explains what is envolved when you need to scale a microblogging service such as Twitter. The author created Nouncer (a developer platform for building microblogs and similar services) and ended up learning quite a lot about the inner-workings and challenges of such an application.
Please do read it, it’s a series of 3 articles:
- Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I
- Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part II
- Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part III
My thoughts? Scalling is not a solved subject, and it depends on the expertise of the developer/architect on finding ways to identify the fine grained causes for bottlenecks and to deal with them in a rather creative way, cycling between endless monitoring and improvements down the road.
Fun, isn’t? 
