While 100k views/day is good traffic it's generally not at the level where I'd consider it 'scaling". Unless you app is very complex or CPU intensive 100k/day should be achievable by out of the box settings on a single server. I've done this with a few different JBoss based applications with zero performance tuning tweaks or issues.
To me real scaling is where you're having to run a cluster since a single server is inadequate to handle the traffic, where you're having to implement or leverage various application caching schemes, etc...
Rails has been dealing with the 'can't scale' accusations forever, even though it has been scaling fine for a lot of people for at least 4 years, if not longer.
But remember that a lot of people who start with Rails are not sysadmins, and may have absolutely no idea how to scale anything. I'd bet they'd probably hit the same scaling trouble if they used anything.
If you listen to folks that have had to scale out to meet demand, you hear the same thing repeated: once you get beyond a certain number of connections, things like choice of language level out and you have other things to worry about. Default installs of WordPress don't scale either, because of database load. That doesn't necessarily mean that WordPress can't scale.
Like anything else, Rails can scale, but often times those deploying it just don't know how. I know I sure didn't when I started out. And every web project I've been on has had different scaling needs. Rails has, in my experience, been easier to scale out than the ASP or PHP apps I used to maintain.
The vast majority of startups don't have to worry about "real" scaling. You don't need to be Twitter or Facebook to make money; in fact, it might help to not be. Especially, if you are actually, you know, charging for a product.
This fascination with scaling is hazardous to the health of both the startup and engineering communities.
100k views/day, while not huge is certainly way more than what the usual application you'd build nowadays is hit with.
To recommend against rails based on the assumption that it'll scale badly in cases where it has to handle more than 100k views per day isn't really helpful.
Once you reach these values, chances are, you'll have team, budget and need for a custom solution anyways.
Now, I'm no rails developer and I never got to really like the framework. So if you ask me, I would find other issues that prevent me myself from using rails (many personal soft-facts - a matter of preference). The (supposed) inability to scale beyond 100k views/day isn't one I'd consider first
To me real scaling is where you're having to run a cluster since a single server is inadequate to handle the traffic, where you're having to implement or leverage various application caching schemes, etc...
Can you explain how Rails doesn't handle this? Because all of my (admittedly limited) experience says it handles it just fine.
I'm not saying Rails does or doesn't handle this at all. I don't use Rails. I was just commenting that the parent response regarding 100k pages/day doesn't really mean that much either way imho.
To me real scaling is where you're having to run a cluster since a single server is inadequate to handle the traffic, where you're having to implement or leverage various application caching schemes, etc...