He might be out of touch with the gadget side of web applications (can phillg make rounded corners with Processing.js or Raphael.js or Shoooes? I don't think so.) but his server architect credentials are untouchable. The fucker started a social networking site for photographers in 1993. He taught web application development at MIT and the book he coauthored is still used today.

And if you think there is anything "modern" to scaling web applications, you would be wrong. When push comes to shove, everybody reaches out to their Unix system call manpages and pulls out 20+ year old profiling tools. It's the front-end that's sassy ;-)

I agree some tools never go away, but I hope you're not literally saying that no advances have been made in scaling techniques in the past decade or so.

Almost a decade ago I worked on a large scale site that ran on PHP3, MySQL 2 (before it had replication), and depended on a hardware load balancer. Today, between RoR, Memcached, Amazon AWS, etc. etc. I can build and scale out an app 10x faster and cheaper than I would've been able to a decade ago. (Hey, isn't this the fundamental rationale behind YC?)

Even ignoring new software, the availability of cheap memory and gigabet networking alone inform different architecture decisions than 1993.

Server performance hacks age the best out of all the performance optimization techniques I can think of. The same socket descriptor multiplexing tricks that were used to make news servers pump gigabytes of alt.binaries.* a day, in that age of "megabit networking", can be used today to push html and a few pngs very comfortably. Why? because network capacity, memory size and processor speed are growing orders of magnitude faster than network service consumers are being created, making the old network performance hacks far more powerful today (solely focusing on human users here, though even software "users" can be tolerated with more intelligent "push" architectures allowing the server to deliver content to its subscribers at its earliest convenient time.)

Also, changes in kernel architectures and the addition of fast and faster system calls only makes it better, but not different.

Unix (mostly BSD) ftp servers were at some point in the not-so-distant history the only places to get software; Simtel.net run on ONE server with no load balancing. Email? anon.benet.fi scaled really well. Not to long ago, single Unix servers were household names and their admins and systems hackers were Gods.

"single Unix servers were household names and their admins and systems hackers were Gods"

Back in those days, akebono.stanford.edu was as famous as Britney Spears, Segways dominated the roads, and women outnumbered men in CS departments.

Indeed. And the trolls were tenured PhDs.

With programming pop culture being so large today, why aren't the greybeards (and/or their ideas) a larger part of it?

I would love to be reading more oldschool stuff on sites like this, but "ruby + cloud" style stuff is news.

And for me, at least to some degree, what I read is what I use.

Because there is no $ in hyping the tried and true.

There is if you rename it and market it correctly.

Yeah, okay, but this article should be titled "Virtualization and the importance of being stupid"

This has next to nothing to do with Ruby or Rails. He's right on the count that you should go with the options that work, but the key lesson here isn't that mongrels don't work, it's that shared hosting sucks for their purposes.

Also, ActiveRecord isn't a replacement for SQL. It is a convenience layer on top of SQL. I love my ORMs (and i've enthusiastically moved to DataMapper), but guess what i was doing today? Yep, that's right, i was writing SQL :P