Performance Tuning
Once you've built an application, you're likely to want to improve its performance. Ruby on Rails has several caching methods to help you. Sometimes, however, you need to modify the queries Active Record creates, or create manual ones, to improve performance. In any case, the first step is to analyze the application's performance to determine where improvements are needed.The Rebuilding and Scaling of YellowPages.com
John Straw, chief software architect at YellowPages.com, gave an excellent talk at RailsConf about YellowPages' conversion to Rails. John's talk covered the scaling issues, but the talk was just as much about the process of successfully doing a big rewrite of a critical application at a large company. continue...
New Articles
from around the Web
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Ruby on Rails: scaling to 1 billion page views per month
LinkedIn’s “Bumpersticker” Facebook application delivers more than 1 billion page views per month and is written in Rails.
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Chatting with Blaine Cook (Twitter)
Interview with Blaine Cook, after his departure from Twitter, which discusses some of the issues that Twitter struggled with.
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Is twitter still the biggest rails site?
An excellent discussion of the scale of various Rails sites, with some useful data in the comments from people involved in the various sites.
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Announcing Palmist
A tool for finding and fixing MySQL bottlenecks in Ruby on Rails applications
- Plugins - Seamless Database Pool
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Rails Asset Cache
Using the Rails 2.0 asset cache option to improve page load times by combining css and JavaScript files.
- Nimble Method: Guerrilla's Guide to Optimizing Rails Applications
- Friends for Sale Architecture - A 300 Million Page View/Month Facebook RoR App
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Rails on the Run
Interesting write-up about a mad dash to get GumGum ready for a mention on TechCrunch.
- Optimization Tips: Ruby on Rails and MySQL
- Bamboo Blog - Database Optimization for Rails Apps
Related Books
Solaris(TM) Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris (Solaris Series)
While the primary focus of the book is performance analysis on Solaris, this book's coverage of DTrace, a very powerful low level analysi...
List: $54.99 Amazon price: $43.99 Buy
Deploying Rails Applications
A Step-by-Step Guide
Everything from source control and migrations to Capistrano, rake tasks and beyond. How to deploy your applications to multiple productio...
List: $34.95 Amazon price: $23.07 Buy
Capacity Planning for Web Services: Metrics, Models, and Methods
Discusses capacity planning, performance analysis and modeling throughout a web application or service infrastructure.
List: $54.99 Amazon price: $45.26 Buy
Links by Type
Documentation (1)
- Rails performance tip - using YSlow
Handy guide looking at the results of the Yahoo yslow FireFox plugin and how to handle some of the performance issues using Ruby on Rails or web server (nginx) configuration tricks.
Screencasts (1)
Software (11)
- production_log_analyzer
Gem for analyzing Rails production logs to find the slow parts of your code. - Blazing fast page loads through bundled CSS and Javascript
Plugin that bundles multiple CSS and JavaScript files into a single pair of files to improve page rendering times. - How to Stress or Load Test in Ruby on Rails
Listing of stress and load testing tools that are useful with Ruby on Rails (and other) web applications. - Rails Analyzer
Doesn't appear to have been updated in a while, but still lots of logging/analysis tools to check out. - MOle: Project Info
Mole is a gem that instruments your application and stores usage and performance information in the database. - Log Juicer - Squeeze something from your Rails logs
- Railsbench
Set of scripts for doing benchmarking and performance analysis of Rails apps. - ruby-prof
ruby-prof is a fast code profiler for Ruby. - RubyRun Performance Diagnostic Tool
A stand-alone performance diagnostic tool from Rubysophic, which plans to introduce a hosted service to complement the software. - httperf
Httperf is a tool for measuring web server performance. It provides a flexible facility for generating various HTTP workloads and for measuring server performance. The focus of httperf is not on implementing one particular benchmark but on providing a robust, high-performance tool that facilitates the construction of both micro- and macro-level benchmarks. - request-log-analyzer
Simple gem/script that helps analyze Rails log files for hotspots.
Presentation Slides (3)
- A Small Talk on Getting Big
Talk from RailsConf Europe 2007 on scaling Rails applications, based on the Twitter experience. - Httperf Presentation
Presentation slides, recording, and quick reference for Httperf talk at www2007 conference. - EXPLAIN Demystified: MySQL Conference & Expo - Co-presented by MySQL & O'Reilly Conferences, April 14 - 17, 2008, Santa Clara, CA
Good overview of what EXPLAIN is, how its results are calculated, and what all of the data is presents means.
e-Books (1)
- Using memcached
Guide to using memcached, an in-memory object caching system.
Hosted services (4)
- New Relic RPM (Rails Performance Management)
Ruby on Rails plug-in and hosted service for performance analysis. Can be used in development and in production. "Lite" service is free; more features available on paid plans. - Five Runs TuneUp
A new socially networked application profiling tool for Ruby on Rails applications. You can view the performance details for your application, and if you want help, you can upload your performance data to the FiveRuns site, where colleagues or the Rails community at large can offer help. - FiveRuns Manage
Hosted service for monitoring the performance of your Ruby on Rails application, as well as all the software components of your hosting infrastructure. - Scout Ruby on Rails Monitoring
Ruby on Rails application monitoring tool. Installs as a gem on your server. Supports plug-ins for extending its monitoring functions. Limited free plan with 30-minute monitoring interval for a single server, plus a variety of paid plans for multiple servers, more plug-ins, and more frequent monitoring.
Top Blogs
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RailsExpress.blog
Blog on Rails performance tuning, from the author of the railsbench gem.
- dormando
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New Relic Blog
From the creators of the New Relic Rails Performance Management system.
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Five Runs Blog
Includes interviews with a variety of folks from the Rails community.
- MySQL Performance Blog
