Jim Meyer and Ikai Lan:"One of the best things about working for LinkedIn is the constant exposure to new technologies and challenges. While the majority of the LinkedIn infrastructure runs on Java, it’s no secret that we don’t shy away from other interesting languages and frameworks – we’re always looking for ways to make better software faster. This is the spirit that launched the LED group with the charter to see how quickly it could prototype new ideas and features using Ruby on Rails." -

From the company who knows something about scaling graph traversal. The numbers are interesting:

"Here's a quick snapshot of Bumper Sticker statistics at this moment:

• 13.5 million installations
• 1.5 million daily active users
• 20-27 million canvas page views a day

All of this is served by:

• 13 web application servers running nginx and mongrel
• 8 static asset servers serving over 3,500,000 stickers, soon to migrate to a content distribution network (CDN)
• 4 MySQL servers in a master/slave configuration using Rick Olson’s excellent masochism plugin"

I'd love to know what percentage of that traffic is being served by nginx as opposed to dynamic Rails. The rest of the post is interesting - it seems Rails was chosen for its development speed - Linkedin is a Java shop.

Anyway to beat a horse to death - scaling is design thing, not a language thing.