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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wayne62682" data-source="post: 4406287" data-attributes="member: 40455">Aeolius, that's a great idea.<tangent>The problem with Gleemax was that it was working alongside PHP based forums, with their own data, and trying to act as a broker between the two.  That's why there was so many problems with it.  The forums have always been buggy and prone to crashing.  As I recall the official word was it had to do with the size of the MySQL database it used, and they couldn't implement clustering for some reason.  I'm not even sure what Gleemax used as a database; SQL Server makes sense, but since Gleemax brokered the login to the forums, and the forums use MySQL, maybe it was using MySQL as well?In any event, I don't think it was an issue of technology chosen, but more a lack of planning prior to hand specs (of course, I doubt there were any specs) to developers, and a lack of budget to properly do things.  If you want a MySpace clone and have as big (technically speaking) a fanbase as Magic+D&D+Other games who you can reasonably guess would want to use it (after all, people didn't want to use it largely, I think, because it never worked), you need a decent budget to set up a database cluster for it to scale properly.  You can't expect SQL Server Express and 2GB of space to work (NOTE:  I don't know what they had.  This is an extreme example, obviously) for anything beyond a prototype/limited beta.Oh, and Ruby on Rails is teh awesome, although the community is rather rabid and David H. Hansson (the creator) seems to have a very elitist, snobby attitude.  Twitter's problem is that they didn't plan for it to take off, so when it did they were left scrambling to make it scale, instead of putting measures in place just in case it did scale.  Rails can scale adequately if you prepare for it.  If you throw together a quick mockup and you suddenly start getting millions of users, you're probably in a bad spot.</tangent></blockquote>

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