"Multi-core Hysteria": FUD about CRUD?

In a blog post called “Multi-core hysteria and the thread confusion,” DHH wrote that the advancement of “multi-core technology has caused quite a few folks to pontificate that the sky is falling for Rails because we’re not big on using threads.” He asserts that “It isn’t.” In this talk I will detail specific concerns Rails community members have brought up and evaluate them, MythBusters-style. The issues are largely centered around the importance of making Rails thread-safe in short order and how much work would be required to make the changes. I will describe the status of the concurrency support for each of the main Ruby implementations. Then I will analyze relevant parts of the Rails core code to determine the extent to which Rails is poised to leverage those concurrency models to enhance performance.