This article appears to make the following argument:
1. Ruby/Rails developers use Ruby/Rails even though it is slow because storage access is slower (and thus the bottleneck).
2. Storage access is about to get much faster as people switch from spinning disks to SSDs.
3. Therefore, people will start using faster performing languages because app server language will become the bottleneck.
However, there are two questions I have about this argument:
1. How much faster are SSDs in common database scenarios? Presumably, they are much faster for point queries? But is it 2x, 10x, or 100x? How much faster are they per dollar (e.g., how do SSDs compare to tons of spinning disks in RAID)? Will they impact common caching scenarios (e.g., memcache)?
2. Are app servers ever the bottleneck? Modern web development seems designed for stateless, horizontal scaling ("scale out") at the app server layer. Further, this stateless, horizontal scale out requires no effort for even the smallest shops, through things like Heroku, App Engine, EC2, and similar services. Will it ever make sense to trade off expensive programmer time (by coding in a lower level language) for less app servers at all but the most extremely popular websites? Is there some compelling reason the app server layer should not be stateless?
1. Ruby/Rails developers use Ruby/Rails even though it is slow because storage access is slower (and thus the bottleneck).
2. Storage access is about to get much faster as people switch from spinning disks to SSDs.
3. Therefore, people will start using faster performing languages because app server language will become the bottleneck.
However, there are two questions I have about this argument:
1. How much faster are SSDs in common database scenarios? Presumably, they are much faster for point queries? But is it 2x, 10x, or 100x? How much faster are they per dollar (e.g., how do SSDs compare to tons of spinning disks in RAID)? Will they impact common caching scenarios (e.g., memcache)?
2. Are app servers ever the bottleneck? Modern web development seems designed for stateless, horizontal scaling ("scale out") at the app server layer. Further, this stateless, horizontal scale out requires no effort for even the smallest shops, through things like Heroku, App Engine, EC2, and similar services. Will it ever make sense to trade off expensive programmer time (by coding in a lower level language) for less app servers at all but the most extremely popular websites? Is there some compelling reason the app server layer should not be stateless?