Capacity vs. Scalability

13 11 2007

In I still don’t get the fascination with Ruby on Rails, Andy Davidson writes:
Scaling does not mean “Allows you to throw money at the problem”, it means “Can deal with workload”. He goes on to recommend mod_perl instead of Rails.

I’m not interested whether he likes Rails or not. Lots of people hate Rails, and I don’t care. I’m not going to make a big deal about the fact that he’s comparing a runtime architecture (Apache + mod_perl) with a framework (Ruby on Rails).

Those are insignificant compared to his claim that scalability means “Can deal with workload”. Actually, that’s a description of capacity.
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Looking forward to LinuxWorld Expo SF 2007

27 07 2007

Last year I was doing mobile development and there was interesting Linux-as-smartphone-OS stuff going on. Now I’m doing Ruby on Rails development and there’s interesting server grid stuff going on. Here’s what I’m looking forward to finding out more about (all of these are things I’ve been watching or directly researching already):
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Ubuntu Linux 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” upgrade report

23 04 2007

7.04 (meaning “the major release planned for 2007/04″, not meaning “the minor release following 7.03″) was released on April 19th. I upgraded today and it went pretty well, with a bit of manual cleanup required. More details after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »



Ugly Data Centers

7 01 2007
  1. Pink walls, no cases. Nice!
  2. Where’s the marinara?