These things are less secret than you think. Twitter's solutions to
scaling issues are going to be inappropriate to your scaling issues.
Knowing the details won't help you, knowing the techniques will.
See also:
http://www.slideshare.net/Georgio_1999/how-to-scale-v2/
and
http://www.slideshare.net/Georgio_1999/how-to-scale-your-web-app/
Some of this sort of thing seems a bit over the top in terms of what
one might be required to do when scaling web apps based on, shall we
say, more efficient languages that run faster.
Given the fact that Ruby can be no faster than 1/10th the speed of
let's say almost any other language (take your pick) I would surmise
one might have to work 10x harder to scale a RoR app than if something
more efficient were being used.
RoR gives a double whammy for scalability - Ruby is not all that
speedy and Rails emits SQL Statements with a lot of "*" chars -
combine both and you have scalability issues to be sure. Of course I
know some people who say "*" chars in SQL Statements actually makes
the SQL run faster but then those who say that also don't like to run
benchmarks because benchmarking is seen as being a waste of time and
effort. I did run a benchmark that demonstrate the use of "*" in SQL
statements makes the SQL Engine run anywhere from 10% slower to 880%
slower even when very long lists of column names was not being used as
is the case when "*" is used in place of a list of column names.
On the other side of the coin, RoR is very easy to code and this one
factor alone is generally what people cite as being the real reason
RoR was used. Having coded other languages I can tell you all
languages are easy to code once that language is understood well
enough to make the act of coding enjoyably quick and easy.
Keep in mind, I am a died in the wool Ruby lover like the rest of us
here however when it comes to scalability issues I have seen Ruby
enthusiasts spend a lot of time waiting for their code to run so a bug
can be fixed just so they can wait even more time to get to the next
instance of a bug fix. This tends to place some weight on the side of
the balance where coding with a more performance conscious language
may be more profitable in terms of where one spends their time as
opposed to simply focusing on the easy-to-code side of the equation.