Scaling isn't easy, it never was. Its not easy with any dynamic language. So, twitter as a rails application is facing some issues of scaling. So while I was sleeping peacefully, a war was going on, in the community. Alex, the twitter developer shares his thoughts, http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twitter-developer-alex-payne/ and DHH retorts back, and criticizes arms-crossed approach, http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000608.html.
So, what shall a rails developer learn from this. Well, just the basics that - any fool can code web pages, its not rocket science for sure. But how will he react when problems like these strike him? LiveJournal invented memcached, Google invented GFS, Wikipedia does this by aggressive caching. You can't get a out of box, scaling solution. This is the precise reason, Why I have been adamant about hiring people, who know ruby better, who can dig into the internals and come up with shiny code.
Dr Nic, comes with a solution, http://drnicwilliams.com/2007/04/12/magic-multi-connections-a-facility-in-rails-to-talk-to-more-than-one-database-at-a-time/, which is not exactly the same. But lets see. Oh and dev.rubyonrails.org is a python page, which had same problem with trac.
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