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0 pointsmkr-hn15y ago0 comments

I recall twitter originally being written in something that proved unscalable, so they had to switch. Can't remember what it was though.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

kondro15y ago· 2 in thread

It was Rails and, it wasn't that it wasn't unscalable but because they did it wrong then, they hired a bunch of developers that knew nothing about Rails, so of course they moved a lot of new and core development to other technologies.

jarin15y ago

It also had a lot to do with the fact that at the time Rails sites mostly ran on lighttpd or Mongrel, which was notoriously crashy (god was originally invented just to restart crashed Mongrels). From what I understand, at the time ActiveRecord hadn't yet been rewritten in C, which was also a big bottleneck for them (not to mention trying to scale MySQL to an insane level of traffic).

Nowadays, we have fancy stuff like Resque for background jobs, Passenger (aka mod_rails) for serving up Rails content, and a plethora of NoSQL databases.

texel15y ago

ActiveRecord was never rewritten in C. Twitter's problems stemmed from the fact that they had written a realtime messaging system, but designed it like a microblogging platform. The design wouldn't have scaled well, regardless of the technology they used.

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j_baker15y ago

They didn't actually switch. They still use Ruby on Rails. They do use more things like Scala now than they used to.

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