I stumbled across an interesting list just now, I suspect that it has solved a mystery that I have been curious about for some time.
My curiosity was first piqued by penny arcade, a popular gaming comic site. The thing that bothered me was how it managed to be somewhat broken and slow on occasion. I mean yeah traffic can kill a site, but penny-arcade is or should be mostly static content, we are not talking about running an application at most its serving static content that gets updated occasionally. Thats an easy to solve problem no matter what traffic you throw at it provided you have the cash and PA seems to have the advertising cash since well it also seems to have all the traffic. Yeah its got a forum but I don't frequent the forum so thats not the bit I'm talking about and the forum should really be running on separate machines anyhow. So how can this be borked? its a mystery so it is.
But today it all became clear when I discovered that kongregate was running on ruby on rails. Now I dont know anything about ruby or rails apart from noticing something of a fine rant about the fact that it doesnt really work. Not working is actually kinda normal with software, most of it doesn't really work but we do the best we can and mostly things get fixed and work out in the end but the blame here is pointed at the community developing rails. That's something of a unfixable problem, a nice schizim and name change is about the only thing that can sort that out.
Anyway, kong on rails, why that could explain why the site has this sort of not really working very well feel to it. Maybe, just maybe, rails really is a big problem here I wonder what else runs on rails. (Thinks jokingly: I bet twitter does, that thing is up and down like a whores knickers)
So then I find this http://rails100.pbwiki.com/Alexa+Rankings what an interesting list, oh look see theres twitter and there penny arcade. Why this may explain everything, it is in fact like a list containing every "web 2.0" site that doesn't really work very well. All the sites on there that I recognise and use have been chock full of technofail in my personal user experience.
So this rails thing sux then?
Sure some of these sites may work well, but good coders can make anything work well, that's how you know you have good people. There certainly seems to be some correlation here between rails and sites with issues and I'm always suspicious of peoples overly emotional attachments to such things as ruby on rails.
Yay, another mystery solved.
/me puts the kettle on.
