A little tempest in a teapot the past day or so has been the interview Twitter developer, Alex Payne did. In it, he somewhat calls out Rails for some of the performance issues Twitter has had. Of course, this causes some to jump on the Rails can’t scale bandwagon but I think that really misses the point.

It seems Twitter is doing upwards of 11K hits per second. That is a very impressive number for any site to handle especially when they didn’t build the site to scale from Day 1 which I think it the right thing to do.

DHH has chimed in with his thoughts and tried to clarify a couple of points. In doing so, I think the original post came off a bit defensive but if you read thru the comments you’ll see a good back and forth between Alex and DHH. Those should be raised to the level of a post. In his comment, Alex ends with: We’re happiest scaling on Rails. I think that should be what the focus is, not on the Twitter folks slamming Rails and wishing they had used something else.

More thoughts from Rafe and Kellan. Kellan ends with:

You’ll never build a successful site if you build to scale from day 1, scaling is always a catch up game, but it’s the best game there is.

Another mantra to live by because if you have scaling issues, you are generally doing something right.

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