Will it scale ?

“Does MySQL scale ?”, “Does Rails scale ?”, “Will Django Scale ?”.

Any association with the web show “Will it blend” are merely coincidental. Or is it ?
This article targets on the most top asked question today for developers and anyone related to technology. Which is “Yeah, but does _____ scale ?”.

Everyone seems to worry too much about scalability, people turn down frameworks and databases based on that argument. My question however is “Do you really need to scale it?”.

For example, one of the most recent myths is that Rails can’t scale, and people say it because Twitter, yes, that huge 50 million messages per day website had some issues scaling itself. I know it’s good to have some vision, but come on, do you really expect to get that kind of traffic on your website ?
And if you remotely do, would you blame Rails for it ?

Don’t get me wrong, you SHOULD build with scalability in mind, it’s one of the “must have principles”, but what you don’t need is to stress yourself and neglect some good technology just because some random top 10 website is having some slightly issues with it. Scalability from my point of view is not something directly related with a framework or database, but with how you plan your application, and how you architect it. A couple of months ago I’ve a met this guy who was brainwashing his entire team with how good CouchDB was and how it would improve their app performance , yes CouchDB piece of software but this comes from the same guy that was creating a CRM using iframes with meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”600″ all over it. See where I’m heading ?

Scalability should be in all aspects of you project, from optimized code algorithms to server infrastructures. Because in the end the main goal is: Speed and uptime. But you shouldn’t rely only on one technology or trash another because your site won’t scale. From what I know, everything scales, yes, sometimes it can be a really pain in the arse, but for most of us, worrying about it and waste precious time debating it , is in fact, worse, because you don’t get anything done.

We worry too much, we over analyze things too much, we are very pessimistic and we are always expecting that the world will end tomorrow. The truth is , no it won’t. If you build it with good principals in mind, no matter what technology you use, and write this down, “It will scale”.
So just free yourself of this “should I use this ?” and get your stuff done.

PS: just look at Facebook and their PHP