> And when people whinge about performance... well, so what? Horizontal scaling, friends.
I hear this a lot, but in my experience, it's not a workable solution to this particular problem. 100% of the systems I've worked on in the conventional 'slow' languages (Ruby, Python, Elisp, declaration-less Common Lisp, etc) hit significant performance bottlenecks in typical single-thread use cases. These languages enable me to work quickly when making a prototype, but then I spend a long time optimizing it to run fast enough for a single user.
Don't get me wrong. The speed of development for these HLLs is great. It's much better to be able to move continuously from the first prototype to a production system. (I don't want to write a prototype in C, nor do I want to throw out a working HLL prototype and rewrite it all in C.) The benefit, though, is that I can get a prototype running quickly, and iterate quickly. It doesn't obviate all performance requirements just because there's an HTTP server involved.
Horizontal scaling is a great solution to "my web app suddenly got very popular, and it works great for 1000 occasional users but today I need the capacity to deal with 10,000 simultaneous users".
It really depends on the problem space, though. And for most reasonable applications, Rails/Sinatra scale just fine through well-understood horizontal methods. By the time you're getting to where they don't scale well, you're probably longing desperately for a rewrite anyway, because your core problem has shifted from "Does this solve an actual business case?" to "How do I make this support a heavy load?"
I hear this a lot, but in my experience, it's not a workable solution to this particular problem. 100% of the systems I've worked on in the conventional 'slow' languages (Ruby, Python, Elisp, declaration-less Common Lisp, etc) hit significant performance bottlenecks in typical single-thread use cases. These languages enable me to work quickly when making a prototype, but then I spend a long time optimizing it to run fast enough for a single user.
Don't get me wrong. The speed of development for these HLLs is great. It's much better to be able to move continuously from the first prototype to a production system. (I don't want to write a prototype in C, nor do I want to throw out a working HLL prototype and rewrite it all in C.) The benefit, though, is that I can get a prototype running quickly, and iterate quickly. It doesn't obviate all performance requirements just because there's an HTTP server involved.
Horizontal scaling is a great solution to "my web app suddenly got very popular, and it works great for 1000 occasional users but today I need the capacity to deal with 10,000 simultaneous users".