Rails - Jul 2005 - Railsday -- Demonstrating that Rails "can't scale"?

Now, I know that Rails can actually scale, and I very much appreciate all 
those who are donating their time, energy and resources to make Railsday 
possible, but has anyone considered the negative publicity that _will_ occur 
if the first and third place sites don''t even run?

If Railsday is being run on a dedicated server I can''t imagine why it
would
be incapable of handling the load. I don''t think that it is getting
anywhere
near a slashdot-sized crowd.

Another annoyance is that even if we try to download the site and run it 
ourselves, just to see what it is like, we are extremely hampered, because 
it is only available in an online svn browser. Please at least put up 
tarballs of each site for us to download.

Thanks,

Carl


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On Fri, Jul 01, 2005, Carl Youngblood wrote:
> Now, I know that Rails can actually scale, and I very much appreciate all 
> those who are donating their time, energy and resources to make Railsday 
> possible, but has anyone considered the negative publicity that _will_
occur
> if the first and third place sites don''t even run?
I don''t think it''s a load issue, I think the server config
just got
tweaked.  They ran fine at one point and then just magically stopped.
The one remaining app is still very snappy, so it really doesn''t seem
like load.
 
> If Railsday is being run on a dedicated server I can''t imagine why
it would
> be incapable of handling the load. I don''t think that it is
getting anywhere
> near a slashdot-sized crowd.
I''m sure the railsday server took a hell of a lot more load during the
actual competition than it does now.  Over a hundred groups using the
database and web servers?  That''s probably more than 3 apps now.
> Another annoyance is that even if we try to download the site and run it 
> ourselves, just to see what it is like, we are extremely hampered, because 
> it is only available in an online svn browser. Please at least put up 
> tarballs of each site for us to download.
I''m not sure about this either.  How many people are going to have
interest in setting up a Rails app but not know how to check something
out of subversion?

It''s really up to the authors of the projects to provide that service
anyway.  Remember, the code doesn''t belong to Railsday.  I for one am
continuing development on my app and I know many others are too.

Ben

Carl Youngblood wrote:
> Now, I know that Rails can actually scale, and I very much appreciate 
> all those who are donating their time, energy and resources to make 
> Railsday possible, but has anyone considered the negative publicity 
> that _will_ occur if the first and third place sites don''t even
run?
+1

it certainly doesnt make for good publicity.




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Thanks, actually, I didn''t realize that you can pass these URLs
directly to
svn. I''ve been using svn exclusively in svn+ssh mode and am not really 
familiar with all of its features.

On 7/1/05, Ben Bleything <ben-TGHtUsa5cOzMFIMGWPqnnw@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> 
> I''m not sure about this either. How many people are going to have
> interest in setting up a Rails app but not know how to check something
> out of subversion?
>

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On Fri, Jul 01, 2005, Sean T Allen wrote:
> >I''m sure the railsday server took a hell of a lot more load
during the
> >actual competition than it does now.  Over a hundred groups using the
> >database and web servers?  That''s probably more than 3 apps
now.
> > 
> >
> I doubt its a scaling issue either but it still doesnt look good when a
site
> geared towards a demonstration of capability returns errors left and right.
Oh yeah, I absolutely agree with that.  It''s just bad to blame it on
scaling if that''s not the actual issue.  People read these lists as
much
as they go to websites :)

Ben

Ben Bleything wrote:
>On Fri, Jul 01, 2005, Carl Youngblood wrote:
>  
>
>>Now, I know that Rails can actually scale, and I very much appreciate
all
>>those who are donating their time, energy and resources to make Railsday
>>possible, but has anyone considered the negative publicity that _will_
occur
>>if the first and third place sites don''t even run?
>>    
>>
>
>I don''t think it''s a load issue, I think the server config
just got
>tweaked.  They ran fine at one point and then just magically stopped.
>The one remaining app is still very snappy, so it really doesn''t
seem
>like load.
> 
>  
>
>>If Railsday is being run on a dedicated server I can''t imagine
why it would
>>be incapable of handling the load. I don''t think that it is
getting anywhere
>>near a slashdot-sized crowd.
>>    
>>
>
>I''m sure the railsday server took a hell of a lot more load during
the
>actual competition than it does now.  Over a hundred groups using the
>database and web servers?  That''s probably more than 3 apps now.
>  
>
I doubt its a scaling issue either but it still doesnt look good when a site
geared towards a demonstration of capability returns errors left and right.



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Carl Youngblood said the following on 2005-07-01 12:17:
> Thanks, actually, I didn''t realize that you can pass these URLs
directly
> to svn.  I''ve been using svn exclusively in svn+ssh mode and am
not
> really familiar with all of its features.
For reference, yours and everyone else''s, here''s a link to the
Subversion book:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

Enjoy !
François

Apologies in advance if I''m all over the board on this reply. The
general theme is "learning process" and the disclaimer is that I am
one of the runners-up (Whack-a-Poll).

First off, congrats to the winners! I have a sneaking suspicion that
you''re reading the list.Next, thanks to the whole Rails Day team for
taking the time to organize and manage this first-ever event. I could
only imagine the scope of effort required to pull it off as nothing
short of ginormous.

OK.. my take on things...

On 7/1/05, Carl Youngblood
<carl.youngblood-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> possible, but has anyone considered the negative publicity that _will_
occur
> if the first and third place sites don''t even run?
Yes, it is very disappointing to see those entries not running and it
doesn''t look good. At the same time, keep in mind the scope of the
contest entry. 24 hours of development. Adding, "can it take a
slashdotting" to the judging criteria is a bit of a tall order.
Something bad can happen in any scenario and worrying about every
what-if assumption leads directly to analysis paralysis. The fact that
they''re not holding up to demand at the moment is still disappointing,
but do not assume that application was designed to withstand the
number of users that are currently hitting it.
>  If Railsday is being run on a dedicated server I can''t imagine
why it would
> be incapable of handling the load.  I don''t think that it is
getting
> anywhere near a slashdot-sized crowd.
>From using the site, it feels like the database is somewhat pegged
right now and it is not surprising. The database is supporting
multiple applications, each with their own requirements. How to
support winning apps or all entries in the future is an important
consideration that will/should get attention.
>  Another annoyance is that even if we try to download the site and run it
> ourselves, just to see what it is like, we are extremely hampered, because
> it is only available in an online svn browser.  Please at least put up
> tarballs of each site for us to download.
>  
I kind of like that it''s currently available via subversion One, you
can get a history of revisions. :) You can get a feel for the life of
the contest entry and see how it evolved over the short time of
development. I also like it because many people are new to source
control, as others are new to MVC and new to Ruby and new to
unit/functional testing and so on.This is just another one of those
little things that I think the whole Rails "package" helps make people
develop a little better.

I look forward to another Rails Day despite whatever quirks occurred
along the way. It was bumpy and ugly at points, but it was still a
success in my book.

Just my $0.02.

John

> Now, I know that Rails can actually scale, and I very much appreciate all
> those who are donating their time, energy and resources to make Railsday
> possible, but has anyone considered the negative publicity that
> _will_ occur
> if the first and third place sites don''t even run?
>
> If Railsday is being run on a dedicated server I can''t imagine
> why it would
> be incapable of handling the load.  I don''t think that it is
getting
> anywhere near a slashdot-sized crowd.
Well before we start saying Rails can''t scale, I think we should see if
we
can get a hold of the server logs from the initial days when the winners
were announced. Maybe we will see a rather large amount of traffic, that
most scripting languages would not have been able to handle either.
Conversley, maybe we will see that there wasn''t that much traffic, and
that
the sites being down is really an indicator of Rails'' scalability.

The word on the street seems to be that Rails is great from a development
perspective, but has serious scalability/performance issues. From what
I''ve
seen, these accusations aren''t completely unfounded. I think progress
is
being made. It will be interesting to see how much performance improves when
the work that Stefan Kaes has been doing is merged in.

Steve

The reason for the instability of the Rails Day winners was a  
confusion as to which version of Rails they were built to run on.  
Many of the sites would only run on beta gems and many would only run  
on the stable release. Switching the sites to the stable gem, they  
have not thrown an Application Error in days. I am sorry for the  
confusion, it took a little while to track down the root of this  
issue, but beta gems is admittedly unstable, it is beta after all.

-Lucas Carlson
http://tech.rufy.com/

I thought basecamp was running off of beta gems?

On 7/3/05, Lucas Carlson <rails-1eRuzFDw/cg@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> The reason for the instability of the Rails Day winners was a
> confusion as to which version of Rails they were built to run on.
> Many of the sites would only run on beta gems and many would only run
> on the stable release. Switching the sites to the stable gem, they
> have not thrown an Application Error in days. I am sorry for the
> confusion, it took a little while to track down the root of this
> issue, but beta gems is admittedly unstable, it is beta after all.
> 
> -Lucas Carlson
> http://tech.rufy.com/
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>

> I thought basecamp was running off of beta gems?
Most of the core group is running on SVN/beta gems (and lots of other
people too). It sounds unlikely that just that would cause anything to
crash. And if it did, there would be a trace in fastcgi.crash.log.
It''s even more unlikely since the errors where on/off.

That said, apparently forcing all apps to use the same gem set worked.
-- 
David Heinemeier Hansson
http://www.loudthinking.com -- Broadcasting Brain
http://www.basecamphq.com   -- Online project management
http://www.backpackit.com   -- Personal information manager
http://www.rubyonrails.com  -- Web-application framework