Tom Stuart's dashboard

Hi Randall,

Firstly, I'm just blowing off steam, which is what Twitter is mostly useful for.

Secondly, it's frustrating that the Engine Yard slices feel so underpowered for the money, and in particular it seems unfair that applications use so much more memory on a 64-bit Engine Yard slice than on a much cheaper 32-bit development server, and yet the only solution is to pay for more RAM.

The "back and forth" consists of us saying "our application doesn't consume this much RAM on our dev servers" and Engine Yard saying "pay for more slice RAM, then" -- not so much a breakdown in communications as a mismatch of expectations, since we (unreasonably) just want things to be magically better.

I'm not sure there's much anyone can do about this -- it's largely a Ruby/Rails problem, at least while EY standardises on a memory-inefficient mongrel-cluster-on-64-bit-MRI architecture. Maybe in a year's time it really will be something magically better (YARV? Rubinius? mod_rails? other?), and everything will be peachy, but until then there's going to be steam that occasionally needs blowing off.

Cheers,
-Tom