Twitter is a Ruby on Rails experiment, and at least once a day I am greeted with these messages:
There is even a website called istwitterdown.com that displays a white background with one word in black text. Ironically, Twitter is down now, and it says, “No”. It does link to an Amazon page where you can download Kool and the Gang’s Celebration though.
Twitter’s blue screen of death makes me increasingly frustrated. Why don’t they switch to something that has already been proved to scale? PHP maybe?!
I still love Twitter for what it does. It really keeps me up-to-date with the people I follow.
2 Comments
The PHP vs. Rails argument will go on forever. As with all new technologies, Rails is going through its growing pains as people learn the best ways to roll it out in a big way. In many ways, Mongrel (app server for Rails) is setup to scale better than mod_php does but it is still a learning process. The only way things will improve is if there is a demand for improvement. Twitter, Wesabe, 37Signals and even Yahoo! are helping create this demand.
I want Rails to work, but right now it doesn’t for Twitter. I don’t want them to lose userbase because of performance issues. Google can remake Jaiku in C and sway everybody over.