You should also see better memory management if you're using Enterprise Ruby (from the same developers as Passenger: http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/). Also if your application fits the 'share-nothing' paradigm you could try to put a load balancer in front of multiple machines running mod_rails. Anyway, Rails deployment has come a long way from FCGI to Mongrel then Passenger. I think things look good for the future.

Wrong. That would only happen if email would be an association (i.e. another table), not an attribute of customer (a field in the orders table).

You're just wrong. Order.all is simply an alias for Order.find(:all), and as such and array of Orders - *not an associations*. (see http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html#M001966). There's no N+1 problem here.

p.s. I just noticed the grandfather quotes code in the form Orders.find. This is clearly a sign the author isn't even used with basic Rails naming conventions.

I understand you woes with deploying Rails application. I highly recommend you check out Passenger (mod_rails): http://www.modrails.com/ However I have no understanding for most of your complaints.

So what's Ferret or you inability to manage system services got to do with Rails ?

With power comes responsibility - something you ought to know by now. You can do something just as stupid using _any_ other web framework + ORM; this is not a problem in Rails, it's a problem with the way you choose to solve the problem at hand.

How about counting on yourself and getting some work done (on the Rails framework) without waiting for others to solve your problems ?

are already available in Chrome/Chromium, and I find them very useful. Good thing they found their way to Firefox. I always found it very annoying to have to delete the whole cache in Firefox, especially since you have to do so rather often when you are working on html/css.

Semicolon doesn't imply causality between those clauses.

Vista has a feature they call SuperFetch, which is supposed to optimize memory usage and prevent page outs that would make the system unresponsive when running background tasks (exactly the situation many complained about above - delays in application switching/maximizing after a period of non-use). It's also supposed to preload data based on historical usage of application. I haven't seen any (subjective) improvements in responsiveness over Windows XP however. Might be that when Microsoft gets something right, they make sure to get other things wrong.

... another RIA platform. Only this one doesn't have a userbase yet and I don't think it'll have one to speak of in the near future; it is Windows and Mac OS only (though Sun promises that Linux and Solaris support is underway http://blogs.sun.com/javafx/entry/a_word_on_linux_and). Microsoft has been pushing Silverlight hard and still has only about 30% market penetration in the US (they claim 50% mp in 'some countries' - I'm very curious which countries are these: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx). With Flash+Flex having a comfortable user base of some 90+%, let's not even begin to compare Microsoft's vs Sun's power to push stuff to the desktops of the masses, it's not even funny.

If they want to improve network congestion why not start by implementing a better peer selection algorithm. IIRC currently peers are selected at random. A network topology aware peer selection algorithm might improve network congestion a great deal. Currently I see peers which are on another continent being 'preferred' (to due the randomness) to peers on my own ISP's network, with which I have a 50+ mbit connection.