Article: A Look at Common Performance Problems in Rails

by Obie Fernandez on Jun 13, 2006 |

Rails performance expert Dr. Stefan Kaes takes a look at the most common performance issues in your Rails applications and what to do about them. Advice is given regarding benchmarking, choosing a session container, caching results of expensive computations, optimizing database queries and working effectively with view helpers.

Read: A Look at Common Performance Problems in Rails

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Real World Experiences? by Obie Fernandez Posted

Updated article by Obie Fernandez Posted

good article by Michael Kovacs Posted

Very Useful! by Geoffrey Grosenbach Posted

Great Practicle Information by Ben Askins Posted

memcache-client author by Eric Hodel Posted

Getting Memcache-Client to work with Sessions by Adam Michaels Posted

Re: Getting Memcache-Client to work with Sessions by chris hulbert Posted

Re: Getting Memcache-Client to work with Sessions by Geoffrey Grosenbach Posted

32 percent... by chris hulbert Posted

optimizing queries... by Boing Boinger Posted

'Include' can improve performance? by Zhenbo Hu Posted

tell ActiveRecord what you don not want to select from database by rafael magana Posted

Real World Experiences? by Obie Fernandez

We'd love to hear from any folks putting Stefan's suggestions into practice.

Updated article by Obie Fernandez

The initial publication of this article and related feed snippets incorrectly identified Stefan as a member of the Rails core team. This was my editorial mistake and I apologize for any confusion caused.

good article by Michael Kovacs

Thanks Stefan for this article. Lots of good information here that will come in handy once I'm ready to tune for perf.

Very Useful! by Geoffrey Grosenbach

Very practical and useful. Thanks!

Great Practicle Information by Ben Askins

For me this article is a lamp in the dark pointing out little obstacles I wouldn't otherwise have noticed. Thanks Stefan.

memcache-client author by Eric Hodel

Bob Cottrell wrote memcache-client, I just packaged it up and released it.

Getting Memcache-Client to work with Sessions by Adam Michaels

Does anyone have a link to a tutorial or have an idea how to get Memcache-Client to work with Rails sessions seeing as its the prefered ruby client.

32 percent... by chris hulbert

I just spent today putting into practice I just spent today putting into practice most of the ideas suggested here, especially caching using class variables, memcached sessions, and not using slow helpers.
With extensive testing, my production server now serves up pages 31.8% faster!
63.8 seconds versus 93.5 to complete a test suite i created.
Very happy :)
Chris - splinter.com.au

Re: Getting Memcache-Client to work with Sessions by chris hulbert

Memcached server:
www.danga.com/memcached/
Memcached client:
rubyforge.org/projects/rctools
Hooking it up in rails:
wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowtoChangeSes...

Re: Getting Memcache-Client to work with Sessions by Geoffrey Grosenbach

I did a straight copy and tweak of the Rails MemcacheStore to work with memcache-client, here:

topfunky.net/svn/plugins/db_memcache_store/lib/...

optimizing queries... by Boing Boinger

consider cache-fu. little in the way of docs at this point, but it's a good activerecord cache...

errtheblog.com/static/pdfs/memcached.pdf

'Include' can improve performance? by Zhenbo Hu

I tried, but it seems no performance improvement at all.

tell ActiveRecord what you don not want to select from database by rafael magana

some days ago I made a patch to add a :noselect option to use with the ActiveRecord::find method:

let's say you have a table with 5 columns, and you want to select 4 of them:

User.first(:select => "col_1, col_2, col_3, col_4")

with my patch you can do this:

User.first(:noselect => "col_5")

maybe it's not a big improvement in speed but it can help in tables with a bunch of columns. well that's it.

here's the post where I explain a little bit more how it works and the link to the patch: bit.ly/cIt4pa