Why not? It'd probably take a week or so to rewrite in a different language, similar to Reddit when they rewrote in python :/

Has ror become a cult or something? It's just a language, and if it doesn't fit well with the application, best to move on and try something else.

Rails is probably not their problem. The way twitter works is the problem. (In other words, they need a better backend, not a better frontend.)

I was under the impression rails was the backend and was tightly coupled to a db. Is that not the case? :/ By 'better backend', what do you mean?

I assume the difficulty is storing the data and then retrieving the right data when generating a page. Yeah, you can use a SQL database, but that doesn't seem to be working very well. So they probably need to write some custom storage backend that is actually designed for the load that is put on it. Relational databases are general solutions. General solutions are good for general problems, but not necessarily specific problems.

Anyway, if the problem happens to be that the Rails frontend is too slow, speeding that up isn't going to buy them anything long-term. Eventually the database is going to bog them down even if the web GUI is hand-optimized assembly.

JMHO, obviously I have no idea what the twitter codebase looks like or what specific problems they are having. I also don't use Ruby or Rails, but I doubt that's their problem.

Don't underestimate the rewrite of high traffic site like twitter. Rewrites are among the top mistakes that kill startups, and are risky.

What they should do instead is to slowly rework their code, instead of doing a massive rewrite.

That's the theory. Sometimes the practice isn't so simple, when you have 32423432234 lines of spaghetti code, all tangled up. Surely twitter isn't that bad, but I've been in situations where someone cited that very idea and it just wasn't feasible.

Unless you have massive engineering resources that's not dedicated to feature enhancements and new developments of your main product (ie. a small startup environment), a full rewrite is just too expensive.