Thinking of Switching From Rails - How does CI Perform In the Real World?

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
I know there already are some CI vs. Cake vs. RoR threads, which I read and found helpful. I'm mostly looking for some fresh answers to a more specific line of questions. I apologize for the noobish nature of this post - but I bet there are a lot of Rails guys out there that feel like the platform might not be all that amazing for long term development.

I've been developing sites with Rails for about 2 years now. I enjoy the process, ruby is a fun language and was easy to learn, but a constant problem has been dealing with the lack of support for RoR, difficult configuration, weird errors and sluggish performance.

Rails seems ready for prime-time if you have the cash and staff to manage the issues, but if you are a small shop like mine, it can be a real pain. I'm currently dealing with the aftermath of MediaTemple's meltdown during the first half of october so it is time to examine frameworks that are not such Diva's.

I have some experience with PHP, as it's what I used primarily before switching to RoR, and CI seems like a slightly better fit for me than Cake.

What have your experiences been with installation ease / speed & performance / reliability?

Is resource consumption a big concern?

How beefy a setup would be needed for someone launching lots of small to medium sized sites? What about very large (5000 page +) sites?

Any recommendations or warnings on hosting?

Thanks in advance for reading and any advice. To entertain you I added a fun car comparison poll.

[eluser]Michael Wales[/eluser]

What have your experiences been with installation ease / speed & performance / reliability?

Most all issues with hosting are related to how you host handles mod_rewrite, there are a lot of tutorials out there to get a CI app running on a variety of hosts and the community is always here to help.

Is resource consumption a big concern?

Nope.

How beefy a setup would be needed for someone launching lots of small to medium sized sites? What about very large (5000 page +) sites?

I think a decent Virtual Host could handle this no problem.

Any recommendations or warnings on hosting?

GoDaddy and 1and1 suck. Dreamhost is okay. LunarPages and MediaTemple are pretty awesome.

[eluser]Jim OHalloran[/eluser]
[quote author="bamurph" date="1192493761"]What have your experiences been with installation ease / speed & performance / reliability? [/quote]
Installation is easy, these days I can usually get CI installed (including mod_rewrite), and talking to a database ready to start coding in around half an hour.

Speed/Performance is largely dependant on how you code. If you write slow code, your site (using CI) will be slow. The framework itself doesn't have any inherrent performance problems.

Reliability is good, CI "just works". docs are also good which assists with learning CI, and once you're up and running it's quite intuitive.

[quote author="bamurph" date="1192493761"]Is resource consumption a big concern? [/quote]
Only if you write code that consumes resources. CI itself is pretty lightweight.
[quote author="bamurph" date="1192493761"]How beefy a setup would be needed for someone launching lots of small to medium sized sites? What about very large (5000 page +) sites?[/quote]
Not particularly beefy, you could start off using any decent shared hosting account, or a small virtual server (VPS).
[quote author="bamurph" date="1192493761"]Any recommendations or warnings on hosting? [/quote]
I use OpenHosting. $US19.95/mth buys me a virtual server, with more than enough disk space, bandwidth, etc to run a number of sites. Downside to OpenHosting is that you'll need some SysAdmin savvy to set up/manage the VPS yourself, but if you're comfortable with the Linux command line it's ideal.

When looking at hosts though, make get one that's running PHP 5. Although CI supports PHP 4, some features just work better in PHP 5, and PHP 4 support will be discontinued (by the PHP team, not CI) inside the next 12 months.

Jim.