you're seriously convinced they would have had no problems if they chose something else? every codebase that lasts that long and is used that much is going to face very hard challenges as it scales and meets new landmarks.
the maintainable codebase from day 1 to day 5000 is (mostly) a myth. yeah maybe some other stack could have faced different tradeoffs.
I'm also curious about YOUR choice of stack at this point.
I never said that some other stack wouldn't have problems. My point was that Rails is great at some problems and awful at others. No idea how this can be controversial at all. My impression seems to be that there is a group of fanboys that are not able to have any intelligent conversation on what their favorite tool is good for and what it's not good for.
In my day job I use mostly Rails. My team is starting to rewrite some of the services we own in Golang because Rails is no longer a good fit for the problems and scale we use it for. Rails was great to get started fast.
Nothing wrong with using a press instead of a hammer at some point, they are just tools.
The Rails app I scaled posted half a meg of JSON on every save-request every 10-15 seconds. In Rails, we parsed it, converted some parts into HTML nodes in Nokogiri, sanitized it, and saved it to both mysql and cassandra.
It wasn't a problem other than that a better initial design (nothing to do with rails) could have made passing all that data not needed, which was better for mobile. We had about 600,000 customers.
How many requests per second are you talking about roughly? One major problem we face is that downstream services also have performance problems and have multi second response times. While waiting for the response, a whole rails worker is sitting idle, taking up hundreds of megabytes of memory for seconds.
the maintainable codebase from day 1 to day 5000 is (mostly) a myth. yeah maybe some other stack could have faced different tradeoffs.
I'm also curious about YOUR choice of stack at this point.