I want to show that the notion of scalability is every bit as valid when applied to programming languages as it is when applied to programs or algorithms. I'll also discuss several well-known and not so well-known programming languages from this perspective and give some concrete recommendations, as well as discuss some of the social factors which hinder progress in this field.
Red Hat on Wednesday announced a significant departure from its current business plan, saying its flagship Linux product will be available on Amazon.com's Elastic Computing Cloud online service.
February 17th, 2008 A 'problem' with the Mongrel/Rails platform A request comes in to the web server, and if it's dynamic, falls down to a waiting mongrel process. Mongrel calls Rails which wraps a big lock around most of the request/response cycle so the mongrel thats serving the request has to wait for a response from Rails to unlock and start serving other requests. This is the Blocked Thread stability anti-pattern that Michael Nygard talks about in Release It!. The problem is that Nginx or Apache doesn't know that a mongrel is blocked and keeps blindly sending requests. Thats means that even a single blocked mongrel will result in some slow responses for requests that come in to that same mongrel. Cut the Request Fat And one way to do that is to use the "Skinny Request, Fat Backend" principle. What that means in practical terms is pretty simple: Do as little as possible inside of the Request/Response cycle.
H. Wang, K. Zhang, Q. Liu, D. Tran, und Y. Yu. Proceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer Verlag, (Juni 2008)
Y. Yang, J. Zhang, und B. Kisiel. Proc. of SIGIR-03and 26th ACM International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Seite 96-103. ACM Press, (August 2003)