Twitter's scaling problems have been dominating the tech headlines recently. Scoble is lamenting the loss of features and predicting an exodus. Mark 'Rizzn" Hopkins at Mashable is seeing his own Twitter usage decline due to Twitter's downtime. And TechCrunch has suggested that Twitter will be migrating off of Rails, in what could be seen as a concession that Twitter's scaling issues are due to their choice of framework rather than their architecture.
But all is not gloomy for high traffic Ruby on Rails sites. My friend Khaled Hassounah is the CTO over at MedHelp - a giant health oriented community that does more than 5.5M uniques per month. According to Quantcast, Medhelp's traffic dwarfs that of Twitter.com (though Twitter is said to do 20x its Twitter.com volume via its API partners.)
About a year ago, Khaled made the decision to migrate MedHelp TO Ruby on Rails.
In this blog post, he looks at why he made the decision to move to RoR and what his experiences have been. Here's a snippet on how things have turned out:
Fast forward one year later. And you will notice that MedHelp is up and running. We were able to rewrite the entire application in RoR in about four weeks. We transformed the site from a simple forum application to a vibrant community. Added tons of feature, some of which are complex Ajax applications such as trackers. Swapped out the site’s interface in favor of better flow and aesthetics. And we did all that while growing our visitors from 2 million unique visitors to 5.5 million uniques.
Our average team size during this year was 3.5 people (we are 6 now). And while all of them are experienced engineers with a lot of experience in building and scaling server software (whom I knew or worked with prior to MedHelp, and am proud to continue doing so today) all of them learned Ruby on Rails on the job.
After all this, I am now taking a deep breath and asking myself again. Have I made the right choice? The answer for me is clearly yes.
Khaled is going to be posting follow up articles about specific scaling challenges he faced along the way, and how he dealt with them.
Disclosure: MedHelp was an SEO client of mine a while back
