5 questions to one of the Twitter developers [via]:

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. […]

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. [There] shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow.

I can’t remember who I had a conversation with, a few days ago, regarding the scalability of a high-level framework like Ruby on Rails versus coding and optimizing the exact features you need yourself. And I think we both used Twitter as an example — that you could make a huge Rails website, and that it would be a resource hog.

Or was it an argument I had with a podcast I was listening to? In either case, I’m vindicated. (But, in the latter, I’m also psychotic.)