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- Essen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5RoR is fine to develop on but MISERABLE to deploy. Having built five production sites on Rails, two with 400k+ hits a day, it's become clear that any time saved in development is negated by the horrendous maintenance overhead.
I'd recommend every developer spend some time with Rails. It's inspiring. But as a complete solution, I'm afraid it fails. And this is coming from someone who bent over backwards to adore it.
Mark my words: PA will be suffering Rails related downtime in the next thirty days. - vann, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3RoR defender, to the rescue!
1) It makes no sense to compare Rails to PHP. PHP is comparable to ERuby, which is commonly used in Rails, but Rails is an entire development framework rather than just a means to embed Ruby in HTML.
2) Ruby is slow compared to most other scripting languages, yes, but for most web development this is irrelevant. You're not doing anything computationally intensive for most web development and the bottlenecks are elsewhere.
3) These bottlenecks can be largely removed by caching. Since PA is essentially static I highly doubt you'll notice any performance issues.
Are there websites where Ruby performance issues would matter? Yes, though it's questionable if PHP is the ideal solution in these situations anyhow. If your web application does heavy computational tasks the best solution is to move it outside the application entirely, into a program written in a language like C/C++, Perl, or Python, for example. Unless you're using the Zend tools for PHP optimization, I wouldn't trust PHP with performance critical computations.
I've been doing professional PHP development for about five years now, and I think Ruby and Ruby on Rails are great. Ruby is a much cleaner and more coherent language than PHP, in my opinion, whose performance issues can be mitigated by good development practices. Rails takes most of the tedium that is present in straight-up PHP programming, and lets me concentrate on created a well-structured application. If you have a good development infrastructure deploying Rails applications is really a non-issue, and overall configuration is basically a one-time deal.
I think most of the anti-RoR posts that pop up in any post about Rails is mostly due to a negative reaction to the hype around RoR. That's how it goes with any kind of hype, though. - heinousjay, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think it's cool that they went with a rails implementation. It's by far my favorite framework.
That said, the caching system that rails provides is very well suited to this usage pattern, so this isn't so much a scalability test of rails as it is the web server they have sitting in front of the app. Assuming, of course, they've done the caching properly. - psylence, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It has 5 goddamn pages, how is this one of the largest implementations online?
Highest pageview volume maybe? - Samuray, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2PHP derived from PERL. RUBY also derived from PERL and was deeply inspired by smalltalk and lisp and python. It's an amazing scripting language totally object oriented. Perl is a great language. But Ruby it's a fusion of the best of two worlds scripting and object oriented!
Ruby has elegance. It has style and taste. It doesn't have just that many modules as "ancient Perl" but has a rocking way of distributing the modules with Ruby Gems.
Rubyists have a motto: "having fun doing it!". ruby's philosophy is "less code is better."
Ruby is as fast as Perl or python or PHP or any other scripting language. For performance gains you can extend Ruby with pure C wherever you like. And for the critics check YARV - a project to "to develop the fastest Virtual Machine for Ruby in the world."
And Rails ? You have to try it to be convinced. It's a revolutionary kick ass framework that's inspiring all other web development languages to implement a framework alike, Catalyst-Perl, Grails - Groovy, Monorail - .Net, Cake-PHP, Biscuit-PHP, Turbo Gears - Python, Subway-phython, Sails-Java...
Deploying it's a breeze with InstantRails.
- shakin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I irks me when a web site has an XHTML doctype and then doesn't validate :(
However, the errors seem to be relatively small things so with a bit of work they could pull it together. The actual techniques used in the layout are all nice and it does render well in Firefox and Konqueror. My only issue is that the post date and author's name fonts are quite small and the layout gets borked on my browser because my minimum font size is set to 10. IMO, it's bad practice when a small font size change screws up the layout. I know a lot of people who set the minimum font size in Firefox and Konqueror. - quastor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Now comes the true test of scalability of Rails. I'm sure it's been used for some large applications, but I doubt it's been tested in an environment that gets 4 million+ page views a day. It already seems to be holding up better than the old php site did.
- Broadway, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't know what's happening to you guys, but it's going lightning-*****-fast for me. Like, almost as fast as google.
- Wolfbeta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1:(
First CAD, now PA.
I'll always miss the old layouts. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I dislike the new layout. It's not penny-arcade-ish at all.
- Broadway, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well, I don't know ***** about website development, by I read Penny Arcade every ***** day. The site is clearly faster now, for me anyways, than it ever has been. Maybe they employed some form of grease.
- teamparadox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Loads nice and quick in Mozilla but barely loads at all in IE
- allthewhile, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0SUPER fast for me. Although the design is butt, imho.
- kolanos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well, I'm getting Interal Server Errors galore. So it doesn't look good for RoR early on...
- neurokaotix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0There site has been really slow lately. Think Ruby is buckling under the pressure?
- osrevad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Ruby on rails is saving them a ton of bandwidth because of much better caching.
- Kneo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Images are blown, site is not holding up under traffic currently...
- WALoeIII, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0lighttpd w/ FastCGI is why its fast, RoR is just a framework (an amazing one that I use all the time, don't get me wrong!) PHP can be this fast when used under FastCGI.
- vertigoblue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0all i know is my PA widget for konfabulator didnt update to the new comic today...
- firblitz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've been trudging through Ruby for the last three days, trying to get up to speed on RoR for a big development project I have around the corner. It's nice to see that RoR is being used by other big sites. It gives me a glimmer of hope that I am not wasting my time.
- neocitron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0cool, renders quick in Safari.. if that's of any importance to you guys..
- hoobla, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The reason rails is faster is that it doesn't need to load the entire page when you move around. It can load up just the parts that are needed upon request.
Or so I've been told... - vh1`, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"bad design on the programmer's part"
which is what I was trying to say above. someone new to rails and/or ruby won't know the difference in good or bad design. their project will be quick to develop, but will ultimately be slower - craigtheguru, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I expected the link to give me a nice article about how Penny Arcade implemented their site and deployed it using RoR. However, that's not what I got so no digg.
- jesusphreak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"ie from the 1 + n query problem. using associations rather than eager loading"
This is something, just like everything else in Rails, that can be easily changed. Its just bad design on the programmer's part if they aren't doing it correctly. - Essen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0vann: I was hiding behind these arguments too. But I'm afraid they're dodging the point.
"1) It makes no sense to compare Rails to PHP. PHP is comparable to ERuby, which is commonly used in Rails, but Rails is an entire development framework rather than just a means to embed Ruby in HTML."
PHP is being compared to RoR as a platform, which covers everything from Apache/FastCGI to Lighttpd/SCGI. RoR is a MONSTER to deploy regardless, and stability is a major issue. The best example is the poor reliability of the official RoR Wiki powered by Rails.
Plus, in my experience, Ruby is not particularly well suited for multi-user development. Especially in environments with more than four people, the "expressiveness" of the language makes it brutal to find consistency in a large code-base where there are far too many ways of solving the same problems.
"2) Ruby is slow compared to most other scripting languages, yes, but for most web development this is irrelevant. You're not doing anything computationally intensive for most web development and the bottlenecks are elsewhere."
I'm afraid this just doesn't cut it these days. Web apps are performing some very advanced tasks, and the ability to have the same language handle everything from image manipulation to data crunching is a god-send.
"3) These bottlenecks can be largely removed by caching. Since PA is essentially static I highly doubt you'll notice any performance issues."
Again, the web has become a robust and dynamic environment. Caching is very quickly becoming an obsolete solution and certainly not a very inspiring one. Besides, most mostly-static sites are better suited for a more widely supported and concise solution like PHP.
"If your web application does heavy computational tasks the best solution is to move it outside the application entirely, into a program written in a language like C/C++, Perl, or Python"
This is exactly where the C-like nature of PHP comes in enormously handy. Porting from PHP to C/C++ is a breeze. Hardly the case with Ruby.
"I think most of the anti-RoR posts that pop up in any post about Rails is mostly due to a negative reaction to the hype around RoR"
This is what got me so excited! Not to mention some awful PR on the part of Zend. I hardly feel it was in vain, but RoR as a platform simply isn't ready for the prime-time yet. I look forward to seeing its condition in six months. - mork571, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1oh my, is it fast?!?
I investigated Ruby and ROR as a framework for an upcoming project. I dismissed it because:
a) Ruby is slow
b) The Rails framework adds a lot of overhead making it even slower.
c) nightmare stories of deployment (one above).
I started down the Ruby road and while it saved me time in development, I found I was spending twice as much time as what I saved in config'ing the server to be capable of generating the pages!
Ruby fails as a production environment. Also, there's some pretty strange and uninformed comments above (reloads a bit of the page instead of all of it so it is faster?? I think your talking about AJAX and that really has nothing to do with Ruby).
PHP is faster hands down.. Ask core Ruby dev's and they'll tell you the same. How is PA performing? I don't care how it performs, Ruby is still slow.
That said, Ruby on Rails is a great framework and should be admired. - jrsims, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Um. You guys do know that the Rails framework hasn't even reached 1.0 yet, right?
- Qopax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0well I don't understand what they did to the navigation buttons for viewing comics. Tiny now and the useability is definitely worse. Does it automatically resize them because of the font or something? I guess it's just annoying having to click on a 31px,21px box at a resolution of 1680x1050. Seems like a very bad idea. Unless of course I'm at fault somehow.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0And yet, their forums, which is real software, is made in PHP.
- hanshasuro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Agreed: The new site design is *not* an improvement.
- Jasoco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0It's ugly until you turn off ad blockers and fill in the empty space. (I just told Pithelmet to not block anything from their ad provider) I actually like it. Change is inevitable. Change is good. Not always, but this time it is. I like it. The old design was tired.
Jasoco approved. - slickdf, on 11/29/2008, -0/+0Thanks for this.
http://www.kezoon.com - vh1`, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I love Ruby on Rails and Penny Arcade. but:
in the past few days I have received more 500 internal server errors than ever before on PA (which was 0). and the new design? I'm really not a fan of it. Some parts look like time was spent on them (header images) and some things look like they were done in thirty seconds (the rest of the site)
as for rails?
sure it's quick. to develop in. but when someone just starts with it, they have a higher chance of making their app slow. ie from the 1 + n query problem. using associations rather than eager loading. I started using PHP five years ago and still do to this day, and something's telling me that I'll end up using it too. especially with news of zend's framework - kabal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Totally agree with the above. The only reason to use rails is its fast to develop in, not fast to run :)
It is cool though. - TheNik, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Haha.
"***** M$"... They say this right after they pimp the 360. ;-; - Destos, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0I personally think the site could look better.
- jessejanderson, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0hmm, but it's still... ugly.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0Penny Arcade is whack.
- knid, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0Ugly as *****.
Plus PA hasn't been funny in years. - peerk, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0Cool. Hopefully the time saved with ROR will be spent on actually making their comics funny.
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