Yeah. The guy usually comes off as an angry lunatic but his posts are still informative. DHH, on the other hand, seems to gloss over details and his posts tend to read more like marketing materials than anything else.

Although this little feud is getting old, I'm also looking forward to DHH's response. It will be interesting to see if his comment about Mongrel was simply an oversight or a cheap shot lie. I think it shows a total lack of class on the part of DHH to publicly speculate on a blog about Zed's mental well-being so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it was the latter.

He may have gotten it wrong that they were running FCGI instead of Mongrels, but I never got the feeling he was blaming Mongrel for the ~400 restarts/day.

"But still an inconvenience, naturally. Nobody likes a memory leak. So I was happy when a patch emerged that fixed it and we could stop doing that. I believe the fix appeared some time in 2006. So even when Zed published his implosion at the end of 2007, this was already ancient history."

I assumed the patch he referred to was for Rails, not Mongrel. And why would Zed make such a big deal about this in the first place if it were his own software's fault?

Be more specific about why Zed's post is "damning".

Did you read both Zed's and DHH's posts? Perhaps "damning" is too strong a word in this situation, but at the very least DHH is clearly mistaken. At worst, he is a liar.

Memory leaks in Mongrel that were fixed in 2006 are the at the center of DHH's argument that RoR crashes are ancient history. Yet Zed shows that the application DHH is referring to that previously needed to be restarted 400 times a day wasn't even running on Mongrel.

It could be a slip of the tongue. It's easy to accidentally write mongrel when thinking and writing about "that guy who wrote mongrel."

It is easy and more fun to assume malice, but honest mistakes happen.

My read was that DHH was referring to leaks in the Basecamp code, not leaks in Mongrel. Was I mistaken? If so, my argument --- that Zed picked an irrelevant nit to derail DHH's argument --- pretty much falls apart.

He accuses DHH of lying, and refers to an earlier (AFAIK uncontested) recording of the conversation to demonstrate his point.

Edit: I agree 100% with jm4's elaboration down below.

You're using the word "lying" where "mistaken" would do just as well. To import the Wikipedia rule: (A)ssume (G)ood (F)aith.

That's a good point. Which is why I said that Zed accuses him of lying, and why I said that it is potentially damning, and refrained from making a judgment myself.. and why I look forward to the rebuttal.

Edit: please see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365020

there... in context now.