Twitter reportedly dumping Ruby on Rails

TechCrunch is claiming that Twitter, that service that lets Twits tweet, is dumping Ruby on Rails after two years due to scalability problems. Twitter has responded by declaring its just as much a fan of Ruby on Rails as ever, and instead is limiting "tweets" to 139 characters (instead of the standard 140) because 140 is "taxing the system."

That one extra character must be one heck of a straw to break the Twitter back. (By the way, it seems like a rather odd way to deal with the problem. Imagine if email providers Microsoft or Zimbra boosted performance by requiring one less word per message...?)

I've heard the scalability and performance claims before against Ruby on Rails, but I've also talked with companies like Engine Yard who insist that Ruby on Rails is not inherently unscalable - it just needs a practiced hand to make it scale. Indeed, Benchmark's investment in Engine Yard was fed primarily by a desire to make Ruby on Rails more scalable.

Twitter may or may not be dumping Ruby on Rails. Who cares? There is enough investment going into Rails that any short-term deficiencies in the technology are just that: short-term.

[tbarrfiveruns]

Dude, that whole 139 characters thing is a joke.

[balleyne]

I don't think comparing it to limiting the length of an email message is accurate because there's no limit on that in the first place. Twitter is tightening a limit that already exists, slightly. A better analogy would be to cut storage limits for your inbox by ~1/140.

Not that it makes it less strange, but I think it makes the analogy more accurate.

[ssampier]

Silly, but not much more silly than having more than two gigabytes for email, but yet, you can't send or receive attachments of more than 10 MB.