"Sascha Ebach" <se / hexatex.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:408CBCBF.1090304 / hexatex.de...

> In my understanding the biggest problem in scaling Ruby (cpu wise) is
> that it doesn't have native thread support, yet. What this means in
> terms of a web application is that if you only have let's say 30
> concurrent users on a fairly new piece of Hardware this is not a
> problem. But what happens if your site suddenly gets very popular and
> you jump from 20 to 200 or even 2000 concurrent users? How do you scale
> such a web app? If you were to program this web app in Java or any other
> language which supports native threads you could simply throw more cpus
> and ram at it.

Not necessarily: typically a queue based approach is used: incoming
requests go into a queue from which a fixed (or limited) number of
processors fetch them and process them.  That way you prevent the thread
creation overhead plus you avoid system overload due to too many threads
(native or not) and congestion due to resource bottlenecks (too many
clients that want to use the same resource).

The problem with performance is that you normally have to try and measure
to see whether it's ok or not.  And of course it heavily depends on the
algorithms and kind of application at hand.  I'd say without more
information about these it's impossible to say offhand whether Ruby will
deliver or not.

Kind regards

    robert