Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

Re:Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why? by cbeach on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @05:00PM (#49352638)

After their infamous "Fail Whale" outages, Twitter replaced its Ruby on Rails / MySQL stack with modern (at the time) technologies: Scala (functional language running on the JVM) / Finagle (RPC) / Thrift (framework) / Kafka (message queues) and this made Twitter stable under the load of several hundred million users.

Ruby is single-threaded, slow with poor GC and memory leaks. As Twitter's Alex Payne said publicly in 2008: "there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind that Ruby itself is slow" and that scaling Rails meant "just throw more instances at it"

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Re:Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why? by lab14 on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @05:29PM (#49352972)

tell that to Shopify that handles 8.15 million requests per second and processes 5.1 million per minute in sales during Black Friday. You scale your architecture, not your programming language.

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Re:Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why? by cbeach on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @07:13AM (#49359939)

Ruby (language) on Rails (highly opinionated framework) is both a language and an architecture.

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Re:Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why? by springtimesun on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @11:59PM (#49356566)

Current Rails and Co are miles away from where they used to be then, but even then my feeling was that maybe it was the skill/culture/dev ops at Twitter that was at least partly responsible for the fail whale. But I don’t have any insight as to what was actually going on inside before and after that transition.

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