Dan Chak’s Blog

Rails For All has as one of its goals gaining acceptance for Ruby on Rails in the enterprise. They recently did a case study on CourseAdvisor’s ability to handle 1.5M users per month on a Ruby on Rails stack.

Click for the case study.

Some notes that weren’t covered in the piece:

• We use Postgres on our production sites. While MySQL has come a long way (especially with the latest spate of Google patches), Postgres is still in our view much better suited for a stack that treats the database as a real component of the application rather than simply a place to dump data.
• Our peak traffic is currently around 32k hits in an hour, which is about 9 hits per second.
• We have an SLA of one second for generation of all user facing pages. The one exception is our “money” page where we do our complex matching algorithms to suggest a personalized list of schools to a visitor based on their individual profiled. For that page we have a two second SLA.