Today Mastodon.social temporarily blocked new registrations & CEO/Founder #Eugen #Rochko (#Gargron) announced that both Mastodon.online & Mastodon.social were running slow due to the number of new & returning members.

That is what he wants you to believe but the real reason is that the language #Mastodon is written in, Ruby on Rails, works fine on smaller instances, but doesn't scale well for large instances so there is a drop off in performance the larger the user population becomes.

Ruby makes it easy to program for beginners, but just like #Python it wasn't designed with concurrency and performance in mind. It grew popular because its expressive power coupled with DRY conventions made it a very quick way to develop web software so long as you could throw more and more hardware at it and restart the server processes before they went south.

People who have switched from #Ruby to #Elixir (#Rebased & #Pleroma are like Mastodon but written in Elixir) just see incredible improvements of their hardware usage just drop right through the floor, and yes, Elixir is the best software language for high concurrency applications, until some high CPU operations need to be processed in another new programming language, better known as #Rust.

Please read:
https://discord.com/blog/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-million-concurrent-users

@alex
@lain
@curtis