"All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but.. this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow."

I've been spending alot of time on back end scaling (after many international conference calls i think* i have a solution), and it's always nice to hear in a bad way that even the best have similar problems. A twitter developer on Radical Behaviour Blog : "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."

Found via Tbray.org which has another interesting tweet soundbite : "I had an off-the-record conversation recently and learned a whole bunch of things about the Twitter/Rails situation. Holy shit, that’s a scary load they’re trying to stand up under and there are some hurtin’ engineers."

* Om's quote on his new found+read blog is 'money' ; "Last nine months have been a lesson in humility, and a harsh realization that starting a company is for those dumb enough to climb a rock face standing perpendicular to terra firma. Confusion, constant second guessing, manic multitasking and perma-smile are new emotions. Caffeine has become my best friend. Sleep and I have broken up."