A site that does 61,000 page views/day is by no means "high traffic", especially if you're distributing that load over 4 machines. Somewhat interesting post, but this is still a pretty limited demonstration of rails scalability.
Fair enough.
FYI - people generally run a bunch of mongrel instances on one machine and use apache to proxy and load balance requests to the mongrel instances. So he's talking about one machine.
Some people are claiming even higher performance than this using nginx ( a relatively new Russian webserver). The preferred Rails "business" host EngineYard is using this right now.
"even higher", as though 61,000 page views in a day is high. That's an average of less than one page per second. 61000/24/60/60=.706
I've built embedded devices that served Perl CGI pages from an all-Perl web server far faster than that (while also doing the work it was designed to do...the Perl CGI was just the administrative UI).
I'm really quite hopeful that this isn't a good example of Rails scalability (because I've been playing with Rails of late with the intent to write my next project in it). I don't mind losing some performance and efficiency to improve coder efficiency, but there is a page load time at which your customers will get bored and leave...I don't want to find out what the load time is.
