Scaling the Rails

This document discusses how a quiz application achieved high performance and scalability. It started with 30,000 concurrent users and 9 million page views per hour. To optimize, the developers analyzed logs, added indexing, eager loading, caching, bulk writes, master-slave replication, and load testing. They switched from Mongrel to Ebb web servers, seeing a 40% performance gain. Monitoring also revealed browser incompatibilities causing crashes, solved by switching from Nginx to Lighttpd. In total, optimizations led to a 25x performance gain and the ability to handle 5000 simultaneous users.