Just how scalable is Grails?

Question

I\'m looking to make a website that will probably get some heavy, repetitive traffic. Is grails up to the task?

Answer 1

Grails is essentially a thin layer on top of the Spring Framework, which many consider to be a very scalable framework in the enterprise world. Spring + Hibernate has become a standard in many Java shops around the globe.

If you run into performance bottlenecks in Groovy, you can always rewrite those parts in Java.

Take a look at the Success Stories for examples of sites that were written in Grails. The Testamonials are also a good place to look for examples. You will use a little more memory(heap and permgen) than a vanilla Java app, but you can tune it just like you would any other Java application.

On the low end you aren't going to find $3/month Hosting options that you could with PHP stack (for example). That said, there are some good caching solutions for Grails apps EhCache, MemCache, etc. Beyond that you can also setup an Apache layer to caches static resources or whatever you need.