Is Rails really worth it? I mean you are talking about interpreted language with full blown GC and yet you still worry about memory leaks? I spent the whole 2007 doing Rails and I just got too frustrated with Ruby and how slow the whole thing seems. You need to put in quite a bit of effort to get some kind of semi acceptable performance and go far beyond to have your application stable.

Is this really worth the "better development experience" in 2008? Worrying about your application staying up and not throwing errors because of some internal issues? Rails doesn’t do anything other platforms can’t. Yes, it’s a joy to work with, but everything else around it pretty horrible.

I know you are talking about 60 requests per second on a not optimized code, but even that is BAD in a production environment. It was horrible 5 years ago on machines 1/4 the power you have now and today it’s just dismal. The web applications arent that much more complex in terms code than they were 5 years ago, but the frameworks that power them are starting to get out of hand and replace performance and response time with convenient development experience.

I love Ruby and I really enjoyed development in Rails, but I couldn’t bear how slow it felt even in development. Deployment is a total nightmare and isn’t for the faint of heart. I went back to ASP.NET.

Over time, I’d bet on Rails performance improving significantly as more bits of code get optimized and the Ruby language continues to mature. And deployment too will see more tools developed and hosts having a better idea how to deal with it.

But that doesn’t matter. The fun I’m having working with Rails instead of PHP more than makes up for the minor difficulties that exist. I’m currently getting close to releasing my first Rails based project and I’m enjoying using it more than anything else I’ve ever touched.

Your post reads like a Microsoft paid for post.

Can you fill us in on the project details?