How a 1-Engineer Rails Site Scaled to 10 Million Requests Per Day
Ravelry is an online knitting and crochet community run by husband and wife team Casey and Jessica Forbes. A few weeks ago they did an interview with Tim Bray where they revealed that their site has over 400,000 registered users and does 3.6 million pageviews per day - though ultimately 10 million requests a day hit Rails (they have significant API, RSS and AJAX usage).
Todd Hoff of HighScalability.com then collected together all of the details he could find about Ravelry and put it together into "How Ravelry Scales to 10 Million Requests Using Rails." It's well worth reading through Ravelry's stack info, but if you want the Cliff Notes version they're using:
- Xen virtualization
- HAProxy
- Nginx
- Tokyo Cabinet (for large object storage)
- Nagios
- New Relic
- Amazon S3
- Amazon Cloudfront (for CDN)
- Sphinx
- Memcached
Also worth a visit, if you care to know about Ravelry's history, is this 30 minute interview with Y KNIT - a popular knitting podcast.
October 9th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Good Post. I'm impressed.
October 9th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Knitting and crochet?! Now my "niche market" ideas don't seem like such a waste of time!
October 9th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Hmm, how is it that API, RSS and 'ajax' requests don't hit Rails? That sounds like crazy talk to me.
October 10th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
this isn't about rails scaling..this is about all the technologies holding rails up. Using this same stack i'm sure you could scale out a site driven by any language. Nothing very impressive here.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
[...] How a 1-Engineer Rails Site Scaled to 10 Million Requests Per Day (tags: rails development scalability) [...]
October 13th, 2009 at 5:44 am
[...] How a 1-Engineer Rails Site Scaled to 10 Million Requests Per Day Rails Inside has the Cliff's Notes version. Click through to find out the dirty details. Good info for all of us running 1-Engineer Rails sites. [...]
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
@sulfide you are right of course - however 'rails doesn't scale' is a common misinformed argument against Rails - so it makes this article interesting even if it states the obvious.
January 8th, 2010 at 4:25 am
Hi.I'm new in rails (though I'm using ruby for 3 years) and this article more than reassuring is very overwhelming..how much keep this application working and how it would cost using other tools like php frameworks or Django, anyone know about this?...thank and sorry for mi poor english I speak italian