A rising tide raises all boats. Increased hardware and database speed will not make Rails less attractive it will make it more so. Far from exposing Ruby's sluggishness (which itself will be less and less of an issue), it will expose how easy it always was to solve most (I said most) scaling issues horizontally.
The majority of the old "Rails doesn't Scale" canard was based on perception and CPU benchmarking that had little if anything to do with actual scaling issues in the real world.
If -- if! -- SSD and other hardware advances remove the classic bottleneck for performance -- the Database -- then 1) the question of performance will become less of a political issue for departments, and there will be far less incentive to look for a scapegoat ("let's get rid of Rails then, it's slow, right??") and 2) in the majority of situations where latency is a problem for a Rails (or Django, etc.) deployment, then horizontal scaling becomes the simple solution, which in fact it always was.
But the biggest reason to use a framework like Django/Rails, etc. will not go away with better hardware: time to market. Use of these frameworks has enabled a number of high-profile sites to get to market quickly recently and handle some heavy-duty traffic by any standards. Can you imagine a Groupon rolling out on top of a J2EE stack?
This is why large web applications written in Ruby/Rails could easily port to JRuby. In fact, we are looking at doing this for our server platform as the initial performance numbers CRUSHED passenger/Rails. Our infrastructure guys even suggested we may be able to decommission some of our servers based on initial performance numbers.
The majority of the old "Rails doesn't Scale" canard was based on perception and CPU benchmarking that had little if anything to do with actual scaling issues in the real world.
If -- if! -- SSD and other hardware advances remove the classic bottleneck for performance -- the Database -- then 1) the question of performance will become less of a political issue for departments, and there will be far less incentive to look for a scapegoat ("let's get rid of Rails then, it's slow, right??") and 2) in the majority of situations where latency is a problem for a Rails (or Django, etc.) deployment, then horizontal scaling becomes the simple solution, which in fact it always was.
But the biggest reason to use a framework like Django/Rails, etc. will not go away with better hardware: time to market. Use of these frameworks has enabled a number of high-profile sites to get to market quickly recently and handle some heavy-duty traffic by any standards. Can you imagine a Groupon rolling out on top of a J2EE stack?