<i>One reason was scale... The improvements the team saw were staggering. They went from running 15 servers with 15 instances (virtual servers) on each physical machine, to just four instances that can handle double the traffic. The capacity estimate is based on load testing the team has done.</i><p>Though Rails is not known of being high performance, this sentence rings a warning sign in my mind that something must be terribly wrong with their Rails implementation.
"One reason was scale... The improvements the team saw were staggering. They went from running 15 servers with 15 instances (virtual servers) on each physical machine, to just four instances that can handle double the traffic. The capacity estimate is based on load testing the team has done."<p>Nice to see an example of Node in the wild. It's so fun and easy to develop in Node, that it sometimes feels like a toy.
"Also, the development time was unusually fast."<p>That's surprising -- my impression has been that one tradeoff with Node.js vs. frameworks like Rails & Django is a lot more work to implement functionality they ship with out of the box -- it works at a much lower level.<p>It also tends to be slower going for a while as you get accustomed to the non-procedural approach.
I'm confused -- isn't Node.js's ruby equivalent EventMachine? Why are they comparing Node.js, an asynchronous I/O library, with a MVC web framework? I don't think this is a fair comparison unless they tell us the MVC framework their Node.js is using, and the server stack their Rails app was using.
This is pretty cool to see that LinkedIn used node.js for their mobile interface for pretty much the exact same reasons I used node for the last mobile interface I built. To echo the article's sentiment, node works really well when you are interfacing with a bunch of other services.
I would be interested in hearing how LinkedIn gets around Node.js issues .For example<p>Isn't Node.js single threaded ? Would it not under-perform , say compared to Erlang or Netty, in a multi-core CPU.
Could someone explain the following: "Connections are all stored locally, also for speed and so if you’re offline, you can still access them."? I'm confused as to how a connection to a remote resource can be accessed offline. Is all of the data cached locally? Further down they mention "We don’t use the browser’s caching system" so I'm assuming they have custom built the cache.
I'd love to see someone put together a guide to Node and the current javascript world for the Rails developer. I've looked at Node a few times, but it's so much lower-level than Rails...I'd think it would be more valid to compare it to Rack. What about the other components of a Rails app? What should you use as an ORM? What about views? What about routing? Etc, etc.