Did Rails sink Twitter?

Brian Ambrozy (primesuspect) Sitepoint speculates that poor planning with Rails is the root of Twitter's woes.

June 6, 2008 2:36 PM ET in News, , ,

Sitepoint’s Kevin Yank asks the question: Did Rails sink Twitter?.

If you use Twitter, there’s a very good chance you see “Something went wrong. Reload the page and try again” or similar messages quite often. Twitter experienced explosive growth this year, but it is clear that their backend is not up to the task. Multiple times a day, I myself get Twitter errors.

Twitter is arguably the world’s largest Rails application. However, Kevin Yank believes that poor planning on the developers part, and bad decisions regarding the overall design philosophy of Twitter are responsible for their issues, not necessarily Rails itself. He believes that if Twitter was developed as if it were a CMS instead of a messaging services, that would explain the issues that are blossoming now.

It’s an interesting article, but begs the question: How do they fix it?

2 Comments:

  1. jared
    6 Jun '08, 7:14 pm

    I fully agree.

    RoR blows. There are like 2 or 3 big websites that use it and promote it - and that's it. It's based on what? Learning it wil get you no where.

    You would be much better off learning Django, which is Python based, because at least then you are learning a real beneficial language at the same time. Many of the google apps/services are all python.

    They should of bailed on RoR and switched to PHP or some other platform a LONNNG time ago. Now that they waited this long they are pretty much screwed no matter what they do.

  2. Thrax
    6 Jun '08, 7:22 pm

    RoR is a young, but powerful language. RoR is based on the Ruby language (Thus ruby on rails). Ruby isn't very fast, like C++ is, but it's still powerful. RoR is easily one of the fastest "Languages" to develop in, because its scaffolding system takes care of a lot of busy work.

    I don't think it's an unstable language, but my implementations of it have been < 100 people. But I enjoyed working with it.

    I just don't feel that RoR is to blame on this one. Perhaps their servers or their DB structure, as RoR functions similar to PHP in CRUD.

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