Mixx: One Year In, Someone's Dropping the Ball - ReadWriteWeb

RoR is a big discussion. Suffice to say, we don't think that Twitter is a good example of the kinds of problems we have. (Twitter is more like an IM scaling problem - as a veteran of the AIM group at AOL, I know just how hard it is to build really large-scale communications networks where you have to deal with a cross-linked network in real-time.) A better example of RoR successful scaling would be AIM Photos, which is humming along nicely at a much bigger scale than we're currently at.

Ultimately, though, the language you use is not the driver for scaling and performance. It's the database design, the ways in which you cache, and the way in which you design your markup. (If you haven't read "High Performance Web Sites", get a copy today. Best technical book I read all year - 80% of performance on a site happens once the server is done it's work, and this book tells you how to optimize that 80%.) And you can get as sophisticated as needed on these things with RoR.

Admittedly, doing RoR naively can result in bad performance. There's tons of stuff that it does for you - but it doesn't do all that stuff efficiently. But then, that's why we're not doing it naively. :-)

As to finding RoR developers: we've had no problems finding good candidates around here, and I don't anticipate any problems having good programmers pick up the language. Frankly, I wouldn't hire anyone who isn't smart enough to pick up RoR given a week spent with the Agile Rails book. (I say this as a person who self-taught himself C++ back in the day. You want to talk about a difficult learning curve...)

But as I said, this is a big discussion...

Reading that article there is something else that ruins the integrity of it...

"Mixx isn't bragging about the number of registered users it has, why does it require users to register in order to participate on the site? Traffic from CNN is a beautiful thing, why not be thankful and let all of convert to users who have interacted with the site whether they've created an account or not?"

Well duh... digg requires you to sign up as well before you can post anything. Anyone can come look, but if you wanna touch you gotta register. Half a second's thought would have produced this much - it helps protect the integrity of the website. Makes you wonder about the author's true intentions of the article.

If I can come on the site and submit randomly, vote all willy nilly, and just cause a ruckus without anyone knowing who I am then the integrity goes into the crapper. The article goes from making you think about how to get the word out there about Mixx more and straight into "Well this is just a mixx hater."

I voted the article up cause I want more people to see it, but don't be jaded by it.

- WayneSmallman
To be honest, I'm surprised, too. But I'm not disappointed. The recent traffic number demonstrate there's growth. Plus, with the list of partners Mixx have, I would be surprised if they didn't grow more in the next 3-6 months...
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- cigarjack
Mixx is the first social news site that I've actually enjoyed using. Hopefully with the addition of CNN the site continues to grow.
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- WayneSmallman
Agreed!

Mixx really is a pleasure to use...
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- PatrickTulskie
I'm actually pretty interested to see how it's going to scale when the traffic reaches digg size.
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- ih8mondays
@PatrickTulskie If I'm not mistaken, Mixx is a RoR site. If that is truly the case, then it would really be interesting to see how RoR scales to handle digg size traffic. As Twitter has often demonstrated, RoR runs into a lot of problems with scaling to handle large amounts of traffic.
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- WayneSmallman
I didn't know Mixx was written in Ruby. Interesting.

A friend of mine has developed a web application in Ruby and aside from the scalability issues, there's also the problem of finding qualified Ruby developers, which they're really struggling with right now...
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- yoda
@WayneSmallman i can't imaging ruby was a great decision...

you get what you pay for, eh?
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- WayneSmallman
Being a PHP developer, that's the way I'm always going to go. I've heard people say Ruby has stuff that PHP doesn't, but when all is said & done, there are probably tens of thousands of PHP developers all over the world.

And that's maybe the difference...
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- Joe
RoR is a big discussion. Suffice to say, we don't think that Twitter is a good example of the kinds of problems we have. (Twitter is more like an IM scaling problem - as a veteran of the AIM group at AOL, I know just how hard it is to build really large-scale communications networks where you have to deal with a cross-linked network in real-time.) A better example of RoR successful scaling would be AIM Photos, which is humming along nicely at a much bigger scale than we're currently at.

Ultimately, though, the language you use is not the driver for scaling and performance. It's the database design, the ways in which you cache, and the way in which you design your markup. (If you haven't read "High Performance Web Sites", get a copy today. Best technical book I read all year - 80% of performance on a site happens once the server is done it's work, and this book tells you how to optimize that 80%.) And you can get as sophisticated as needed on these things with RoR.

Admittedly, doing RoR naively can result in bad performance. There's tons of stuff that it does for you - but it doesn't do all that stuff efficiently. But then, that's why we're not doing it naively. :-)

As to finding RoR developers: we've had no problems finding good candidates around here, and I don't anticipate any problems having good programmers pick up the language. Frankly, I wouldn't hire anyone who isn't smart enough to pick up RoR given a week spent with the Agile Rails book. (I say this as a person who self-taught himself C++ back in the day. You want to talk about a difficult learning curve...)

But as I said, this is a big discussion...
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- WayneSmallman
Joe, thanks for sharing.

I've personally got zero experience with Ruby, but I know a few people working with it, as stated above.

Thanks for the insight, that's brilliant!
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- Joe
@WayneSmallman It's all understandable. The Twitter experience is putting a lot of FUD out there about Rails scaling. But, as I mentioned above, I don't think Twitter's problem is Rails - I think they came up with a really cool product idea that generates load with strange patterns on their system, and their system is not designed for it.
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- PatrickTulskie
@ih8mondays Yep I believe it is as well. That's why I made that statement. Being a big fan of Ruby and RoR in general I am anxious to see how it scales. I think Twitter made a lot of mistakes and blames a lot of them on RoR. Since a lot of people use Twitter they are quick to take the word of the staff to heart. Sure it's hardware intensive, but it rocks at what it does.

If Mixx scales well, is based on RoR, and other sites do not then you have to wonder... what's the real problem? Based on the issues I've seen I'd be more inclined to say it was poor database design and scaling of MySQL. Time will tell though and as I get further into RoR myself I can begin to assert more things about it.

Note: I am a VERY avid Twitter user.
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- PatrickTulskie
Reading that article there is something else that ruins the integrity of it...

"Mixx isn't bragging about the number of registered users it has, why does it require users to register in order to participate on the site? Traffic from CNN is a beautiful thing, why not be thankful and let all of convert to users who have interacted with the site whether they've created an account or not?"

Well duh... digg requires you to sign up as well before you can post anything. Anyone can come look, but if you wanna touch you gotta register. Half a second's thought would have produced this much - it helps protect the integrity of the website. Makes you wonder about the author's true intentions of the article.

If I can come on the site and submit randomly, vote all willy nilly, and just cause a ruckus without anyone knowing who I am then the integrity goes into the crapper. The article goes from making you think about how to get the word out there about Mixx more and straight into "Well this is just a mixx hater."

I voted the article up cause I want more people to see it, but don't be jaded by it.
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- FatLester
I disagree with the premise of this article, and only voted it up because I think it is important enough for Mixxers to know what's being said.
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- bkocik
@PatrickTulskie Actually Twitter have been pretty up front in saying that RoR is not their problem; instead they single out their code base and architecture. If you're looking for an existing site that's written in Rails and shows that it can scale, here's one living example: http://photos.aim.com

The folks who built that are former teammates of mine and Joe's from our days at AOL.

-Bill
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- PatrickTulskie
@bkocik Yeah, I know they have said that RoR is not their problem, but then there has been talks about switching off of RoR to another language and there was also an interview with a certain individual that comes up ALL THE TIME where he kinda blames RoR for the problems. As a consequence, a lot of the world has a bad taste in their mouth for RoR. From what I've seen and experienced of RoR first hand, to fix your scaling issues, you throw hardware at the problem since it can be rather memory intensive (everything is an object blahhh). Personally I'm a huge fan of RoR and Django... and in many ways they have done for web developers what .Net did for Windows developers.

@FatLester Those are my sentiments exactly. I am going to write a whole article on Mixx vs Digg in a David/Goliath comparison when I get my blog up this week.... which ironically... is in PHP (wordpress)
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- FatLester
@PatrickTulskie

I'll be looking forward to it.
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