[Catalyst] Why Catalyst instead of Ruby on Rails?

[Jake]

I was wondering -- just how do you scale Catalyst to serve truly large sites?

Hundreds of $3k+ Apache/mod_perl servers?

I think that's what those big guys do -- it does work. But who wants
to pay for all that? Even if you can afford it.

Apache may be the best but it isn't the fastest -- even in recently version.

Has anyone considered building a really fast HTTP server into
Catalyst? I don't think Rails has that, does it?

Here's what I'm thinking: Catalyst + Perlbal (epoll based) + ESI
(dynamic content caching)

Perlbal: http://www.danga.com/perlbal/
ESI: http://www.esi.org/overview.html

Perlbal doesn't even have ESI or any caching support, and I'm not sure
how Catalyst would be interconnected with Perlbal in a fast way.

But -- Perlbal is really fast, pluggable, and almost all Perl.
ESI-based caching (or any dynamic content caching mechanism) would be
allow you to create dynamic sites that are intelligently cached (or
not). Making it possible for semi-dynamic content to be served at or
near the speed of static content.

To me that seems like a killer feature -- now somebody (*ahem*) just
needs to implement it.