Over on the High Scalability Blog, a writeup on top 10 Facebook App Friends for Sale details that two full-time Rails developers and one full-time DBA have, in three months, built an application that serves 200 requests per second. Yowsers.

Much of the criticism of Ruby/Rails performance woes will simply go away this year, what with Ruby 1.9, JRuby, it’s companion Glassfish, and Thin popping up. Also, Merb, a framework by Rails deployment genius Ezra Z., will likely inspire some performance enhancements to Rails itself.

I’ve always thought that not adopting a development framework just because it doesn’t scale is rather odd. Humans tend to always hold out that irrational hope that yes, some day they’ll be like those famous people on top, even though they’re completely screwing themselves in the present.