So most people complain about Rails not scaling (well, rather, fear it). It seems that with 10 servers you can host about 45 million hits a day. And hardware load balancers. So…that’s kind of expensive, but hey 
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/108421#247177 lists the post. Also at http://blog.innerewut.de/articles/2006/04/21/scaling-rails-with-apache-2-2-mod_proxy_balancer-and-mongrel they list how they scale using mongrel and “only 5 machines” — ok so it scales, but with tons of machines? How well do other protocols scale like that? I would like to see a list of ‘scaling’ on each protocol, with the best of practice. That would be cool. How about a ‘scaling cook-off’?
of course Django (according to http://www.davidcramer.net/other/43/rapid-development-serving-500000-pageshour.html) needs 13 servers to handle 12 million hits a day, so…umm…that seems similar…hmm.
There was a post to the Ruby on Rails group bemoaning its poor performance of say 150/sec to 200 for Django (or something like that). So in reality Python is say 2x faster. Hmm. The plot thickens…
so my latest advice would be pound -> mongrels, apache/nginx [?] something like that
mod_rails for easeNote that apache2′s load balancer dies after 500,000/hour I think…hmm…
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/108421#247177 lists successfull scaling…