Rails is slow? Who cares!
Probably the biggest complaint about Ruby on Rails people tend to make is it is slow. And it might well be, actually.
I mean, it’s not snail-slow, but given Ruby’s innate slowness compared to something like Python, Rails is not certainly the fastest kid around.
That said, I think it doesn’t matter.
Sure, it can bite you when you’re seeing a huge spike in traffic, but it’s just a matter of adding one or two more servers and puff, problem gone.
You might argue servers are not for free, and I’ll reply that nowadays servers are almost free: with a couple-hundred bucks you can rent a very nice (unmanaged) server which will serve up hundreds of requests per second, which is enough for most Web apps.
It’s not that we like to throw away money to get new servers just because we want to use Rails.
We want to use Rails because we’re constantly remembered of how many hours of work it lets us save every single month, it definitely makes us much quicker and allows us to do much more than what we did before switching to Rails.
In the end, if you do the math and take into consideration your hourly rate, the number of hours you can spare using Rails and the cost to add a new server to your pack, you’ll realize it doesn’t really matter if Rails is a tad slower than something else, because it makes you much quicker.
The costs of using Rails are much smaller than its benefits.
That said, it wouldn’t be bad if Ruby was on par with Python as far as performance is concerned. ;)
This post was written by Michele 2 years, 8 months ago on July 10th, 2007 early afternoon.
nick 2 years, 8 months ago
Well… I guess in the end it boils down to being a function of your apps lifetime, the hours you save, your hourly rate and the premium you pay. Something like
if lifetime(months)*premium/month
Tyler Prete 2 years, 8 months ago
While I agree with your point, I’m not sure that Python is really a good example of “fast” either. It is at best 10x faster than Ruby, and I doubt even that. Languages like Java or C# are often near 100x faster. However, especially for startups, I definitely agree that speed of development is almost always more important than speed of execution.
Michele 2 years, 8 months ago
@ Tyler: I know Python is not the fastest language available, but given it’s very similar to ruby, it was a good comparison. It wouldn’t make sense to compare Ruby to, say, C, they’re not the same thing.
Anyway, I agree with you: startups should definitely look for speed of development.
Hone 2 years, 8 months ago
Well there are a million and one start ups using rails which get hardly any traffic – or sign ups – so speed in a production environment is potentially never a factor.
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