david sidlinger

Rafe at rc3.org posted about an interview with Twitter developer Alex Payne where he discusses some of the problems with scaling Rails-based applications. The title of Rafe’s post, Twitter developer: Rails performance blows, was pretty inflammatory and provoked a strong response from interested parties.

The benefit, for me, is that a lot of interesting posts on how to scale Rails.

• Ryan Tomayko has weighed in with a great post on making use of multiple databases with ActiveRecord and scaling in general.
• Another Twitter developer, Blaine Cook, has let us know that the Twitter team has developed some tools to deal with the problem that may be released at some point. Blaine will also be giving a talk next weekend, partially about this topic.
• DHH has posted about a plug-in for Rails that addresses (somewhat) the multi-database issue.  It appears to be a work in progress, but at least the ball is rolling.

All I can say is that I hope to work on a site one day that is popular enough to really worry about this.