  The challenge of ad-hoc computing is to find the way of taking advantage of
spare cycles in an efficient way that takes into account all capabilities of
the devices and interconnections available to them. In this paper we explore
distributed evolutionary computation based on the Ruby on Rails framework,
which overlays a Model-View-Controller on evolutionary computation. It allows
anybody with a web browser (that is, mostly everybody connected to the
Internet) to participate in an evolutionary computation experiment. Using a
straightforward farming model, we consider different factors, such as the size
of the population used. We are mostly interested in how they impact on
performance, but also the scaling behavior when a non-trivial number of
computers is applied to the problem. Experiments show the impact of different
packet sizes on performance, as well as a quite limited scaling behavior, due
to the characteristics of the server. Several solutions for that problem are
proposed.
