Question

My language of choice is Ruby, but I know because of twitter that Ruby can’t handle a lot of requests. It is a good idea using it for socket development? or Should I use a functional language like erlang or haskell or scala like twitter developers did?

Answer 1

The company I work for uses Ruby for our web site. We have so far handled a little over 34,000,000,000 hits. We have no problem handling around 10,000,000 hits per day. Peak hits have exceeded 40,000,000 hits per day.

Scalability depends on a lot of factors. Our databases do a disproportionately high percentage of writes compared to reads, for example. While most websites do about 90% reads to 10% writes, we are closer to 50%-50%. My point is that scalability is affected by a lot of factors. If you are database-limited, as is often the case for web apps, it won’t matter what language you use, you’ll be waiting on your database.

There’s a lot to think about if you are looking at handling large scales. Sharding databases, memcached, etc. etc. etc. etc. The language you use for your application is just one aspect, and often, though not always, a small aspect of scalability.

Ruby may be a good option for you, but there’s a lot to like in other languages. Erlang tries hard to make it easier to recover from errors, for example.