[Catalyst] Why Catalyst instead of Ruby on Rails?

[Brandon Black]

On 11/14/05, Sam Vilain <sam at vilain.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 22:09 -0800, Jake wrote:
> > I was wondering -- just how do you scale Catalyst to serve truly large sites?
> > [...]
> > Here's what I'm thinking: Catalyst + Perlbal (epoll based) + ESI
> > (dynamic content caching)
>
> Let me just chip in with a little recommendation/comment here...
>
> [...]
> Note that there are some quite clearly defined problem spaces where the
> performance of Pg or InnoDB can't match that of a commercial database.
> So ideally, you should know whether those situations affect your
> application and if so, know when you need to ditch your database rather
> than spend $200k and wait a year of development time to implement a
> missing enterprise feature.
>

Agreed in general.  I'd like to point out that as far as relational
database go, in my experience the gap between Pg and Oracle is
extremely narrow to non-existant as of the release of Pg 8.1 for most
all normal uses.  Pg is actually significantly superior for a number
of its features (esp. stored procedures in arbitrary languages like
perl), and definitely for its ease of installation and maintenance,
and the clarity gained by open source code and public mailing list
trouble-shooting.  The only significant places I see Oracle still
dominating over Pg is in the area of scalable HA clustering (RAC).

I can't recommend Pg 8 (especially 8.1 with its partitioning support)
enough for any serious project.  I'm currently pushing 100-200 writing
(insert/update) transactions per second, 24/7 without any pauses
(indefinitely) on a dual opteron with 4G of RAM and some cheap SATA
RAID cards in it (32 spindles all total), and it's all being comitted
and synced to disk properly in the ACID way.  This is a 1/2 TB dataset
or so, with data constantly expiring over time and being replenished
by the incoming transactions.  I have yet to have any significant
issues (certainly no corruption or crashes, nor do I ever expect to),
and even recovery from OS crashes due to hardware or power faults has
been 100% reliable.

(And yeah, Catalyst is what I'm building the web-interface to that
beast in, to query up graphs and tables of the data and alter settings
and whatnot).