A quick note about using Alexa's statistics besides the fact that they are biased. When you directly compare twitter.com vs highrisehq.com, or any other product URL by 37signals, it isn't true comparison.
To access twitter's content, one goes to twitter.com, so all page views and visitors are logged to that domain. However, not a single product by 37signals is setup in a similar manor. For the tens of thousands of basecamp accounts, as an example, each account is hosted on a series of entirely separate domains (projectpath.com, updatelog.com, and clientsection.com to name a few) or, in the case of backpack, across different sub-domains (myaccount.backpackit.com).
37signals only uses those main domains as a source from which to initially create accounts and from which to market their products. The day-to-day usage, read: vast majority of page views and traffic, is done across all of these other "sites." So, it is not a one-to-one comparison across the listed sites and unfair to purport it to be so. More directly comparable visual data would make a far stronger argument.
Now, I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, stating that any single 37signals application has nearly the number of visitors OR page views as does twitter. Furthermore, I'm absolutely certain that twitter's daily traffic dwarfs 99% or more of all sites across the internet. And, I'm definitely not saying that anyone should run a twitter-sized site on top of RoR.
So, it is a fair argument, while obviously biased, that is not far off of the mark. While Rails does scale, it takes a strong understanding of all system components (both hardware and software) and a deep understanding of all applications in use, which quickly adds up.
It is also useful to recognize that twitter and the like are the exceptions in scaling. As a developer, the chance that any site you're currently working on, or have ever worked on in the past will reach that kind of traffic volume is, in nearly all cases, pie-in-the-sky thinking.
In all frameworks and environments, Rails, PHP, or otherwise, there must be a "good enough" point which is specific to each application. A piece of software is _never complete_. There is always something more, or something better, or something different that could be done.
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