As some people already know, I'm moving to San Francisco in early September. One thing I had trouble finding was a map of the San Francisco microclimates. But here's one:

It's from this book.

I'll be living on the border of North Beach and Russian Hill (which is in the warm zone, 6). No place in San Francisco is really "hot", despite what that map says. But the patterns of fog and relative coolness are correct.

postscript

Sorry that my blogging and open-source output has been light; I'm recovering from serious RSI problems. The fact that you see this post at all is a sign that things are getting better, though.

I just want to go on record saying that none of Twitter's problems have ever been Rails problems.

postscript

Brandon Keene is right on.

Echoe 3 is out, right on the heels of Rubygems 1.2. It supports the new runtime vs. development dependencies, and works correctly with the Rubyforge 1.0.0 gem.

It still supports all the usual features like certificate chains, RDoc upload, changeset parsing, manifest building, and cross-packaging. Documentation is here.

By the way, Rubygems 1.2 seems pretty great.

Fauna projects are now on GitHub. Go to it.

The Subversion repos are going away, but the gems and forums will remain on RubyForge.

You can also follow Snax/Fauna activity on Twitter.

It looks pretty small:

Lots of people claim they are bigger, like Hulu and Scribd. And others have published big traffic numbers: Yellowpages and Friends for Sale.

maths

Let's break it down now, so to speak. First, we're not interested in rank, otherwise known as unique users; we're interested in pageviews. Can we get pageview data out of Compete? We can. First, take the visits per month:

Now multiply them by the pages per visit:

Yellowpages:	22957550 * 7.5	172M
Twitter:	8647381 * 8.3	71M
Revolution Health:	11465530 * 3.9	45M
Hulu:	2532132 * 7.6	19M
Scribd:	3100697 * 2.9	9M

The Yellowpages number is exactly what their own developers reported, which is convenient.

However, the Scribd number seems small. Their homepage says "Over 17 million people a month". It would be great if someone from Scribd could explain what that means, but if we generously assume it's visits, not pages, we can update their number to 49M. We will also add the Facebook app Friends for Sale, since their developers are on record projecting 300M pages for May:

Scribd:	17000000 * 2.9	49M
Friends for Sale:	n/a	300M

api traffic

Unfortunately, we're not done. Both Twitter and Scribd have APIs, and that traffic isn't covered by Compete data.

There are a couple public sources for Twitter API traffic ratios, although they're both a year old. Blaine said 90%, and Alex said "many times our web traffic". Let's be very conservative and say that maybe 60% of the current traffic comes from the API.

I have no idea how much API traffic Scribd turns, so we might as well use the same number, although it's possible they already reported API traffic in the 17M number on their homepage.

final ranking

Now, Friends for Sale had reported projected May traffic, but our Compete numbers are from April. So let's multiply each of our April numbers by Compete's monthly growth rate (sorry Yellowpages):

Friends for Sale:	n/a	300M
Twitter:	8647381 * 8.3 / 0.4 * 1.38	248M
Yellowpages:	22957550 * 7.5 * 0.85	146M
Scribd:	17000000 * 2.9 / 0.4 * 1.09	134M
Revolution Health:	11465530 * 3.9 * 1.06	47M
Hulu:	2532132 * 7.6 * 1.06	20M

That is definitely some breakneck growth for Twitter (and even more so for Friends for Sale, considering its age).

So these are our final, wildly inaccurate values:

discussion

It is important to keep in mind how useless this information is. It doesn't even make sense to say "Rails site" or "PHP site", and the rails100 wiki was originally set up as a joke!

For example, Livejournal uses Perl, Memcached, and MySQL, among other things. Does that make it a Perl site, a MySQL site, or a C site? I don't know what Scribd uses, but it's pretty likely that their document pre-renderer is Java or C, not Ruby. Friends for Sale uses Nginx, Rails, Memcached, MySQL, and Linux. Ruby is really just a little piece of the pie.

And Alex himself has said that the recent Twitter problems are system problems, not language problems.

Just in comparison:

Our little sites ain't no thing but a chicken wing on a string.

Francis Irving sent me a note about his work on a new Rails search plugin, acts_as_xapian. It uses the Xapian engine, which is a C++ indexer similar to Lucene. A particularly neat feature is built-in spellcheck.

I still plan to benchmark all these plugins on the Wikipedia dataset...it's been delayed by the new job. If anyone has a big piece of iron I could use for a couple weeks I would appreciate it (16GB ram, hundreds of GB of free diskspace, no production load).