so some of you twitterheads have noticed that twitter has been having some serious issues lately. they’ve probably been down at least 10 times in the past few weeks. well i found the explanation for why.
after about two years of scaling problems, twitter is preparing to abandon the ruby on rails framework and rebuild their entire site from scratch from PHP or java. it is not confirmed which route they plan to go, but they have setup twitter with some temporary fixes to help keep us happy while they rebuild the popular application.
blaine cooke, former chief architect, said that scaling rails was “easy” back in april of 2007. problems persisted, however, even after cook claimed to have solved that problem.
switching to php may not solve all of twitter’s problems. two years worth of infrastructure was developed through twitter and they would face many more issues if they switched frameworks. interesting enough, yellowpages.com is doing the completely opposite. they are scrapping java for ruby on rails.
ruby on rails has always bred controversy. developers argue that it is fundamentally flawed and unscalable and others have argued back saying the opposite and that it is more optimized than php for scalability. funny thing is that earlier this year, one of the core community members and creator of the mongrel rails web server completely abandoned rails and trashed the community.
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