Agreed, that's a sweeping statement to make on Rails scalability. Just trying to make a point though. :-)

As for Goliath - we will. Time is the scarcest resource in a startup, and that's why haven't opened it up already. We need to get some documentation in place, and remove a few dependencies.

Point is though, there is nothing inherently novel in our stack! All off the shelf pieces: thin, async-rank, async middleware, em drivers + em-synchrony.

To be clear, I understand fully that time is limited in a startup. I'm not sure you should spend the time to clean up and generalize your Goliath stuff. It may not be worth it.

But in the context of this post, it just came off as a little bit "holier-than-thou" to hear you say more-or-less: jeez everybody, what's your problem? We've solved this so why is it taking everyone else so long to catch up?

Now I believe you didn't mean it that way, but it seems like a helpful way to push things forward is to release bits and pieces of what you have, or at least write up a bit more detailed descriptions of the various pieces. That would be very helpful :)

I think his point was that Postrank needed performance characteristics that are not consistent with Rails' strengths. While the article came off as a rant (probably to help with publicity) it was more of an ad for Postrank and possibly for Goliath.

Rails is released under the MIT license, Stanley. It's been open-source for a long time. Fork them and make whatever improvements you want and start a push request.

Instead of complain about how slow it is, why not attempt making an "evented" version of Rails? Enable thread-safety for Rails to get a speedy application, even on a shared server.

Frankly, I can't write code for EventMachine. Just looking at its style makes me cringe: there's just something about the design of EM apps that I can't compromise with (and it ain't the fact that it's evented).

This completely misses the point of what I wrote. I didn't complain about how slow Rails is. The original post does. I'm saying that we could all use some help in improving Rails performance so why not release Goliath as open-source? Sounds like that is in the pipeline though based on other comments in this thread.

Yep, here's the async activerecord mysql driver: http://www.igvita.com/2010/04/15/non-blocking-activerecord-r...

It's a start.

Sweet. Checking this out now.