# Ruby on Rails Performance question **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [June 2, 2006, 4:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-on-rails-performance-question/62310 "2006-06-02T16:31:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Jang\_Choe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/cab0a1/32.png) [@Jang\_Choe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Jang_Choe)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2006, 4:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-on-rails-performance-question/62310/1 "2006-06-02T16:31:20Z")
I’m wondering if this is a typical thing. What I’m doing is getting about 5000+ records from a database and displaying all of it on a page. I’ve used the benchmark helper to benchmark the views for that page and that takes about 25 seconds to render that view. Is this pretty typical? What I’m doing is using find\_by\_sql to get all the values that I need from the tables and saving that to an instance variable in the controller. Then I iterate it through that instance variable using .each\_with\_index (I need the index value as well) to render the View. The view is just a table. So I’m just rendering @foo.bar... Nothing complicated. And that’s taking about 25 sec according to the benchmark helper. Is there anything I’m doing in the algorithm that’s wrong? Is there any way to speed things up? I’m getting pressure from the higher ups saying that 25 seconds isn’t acceptable. They need something like 6 seconds. The reason I use find\_by\_sql is so that I don’t hit the database through each iteration. And I figure that’ll help in the speed. Also, I tested the find\_by\_sql SQL query I wrote and checked the speed on that. That’s not the issue (it took about 0.2 seconds for mysql to dump all the data). ---
**Author:** ![Jang\_Choe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/cab0a1/32.png) [@Jang\_Choe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Jang_Choe)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2006, 4:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-on-rails-performance-question/62310/2 "2006-06-02T16:59:21Z")
> What I’m doing is getting about 5000+ records from a database and > displaying all of it on a page. I would start by questioning why you would need to present 5K+ objects on a single page. It would there are better ways to present massive amounts of records than just to dump them all on one screen. ## But if you must, I’d encourage you to go straight to the metal. Grab the connection (ActiveRecord::Base.connection), then use select\_all to get hashes back instead of AR objects. If that’s not fast enough, investigate what methods your particular database adapter has for returning records as arrays instead of as hashes. David Heinemeier H. [http://www.loudthinking.com](http://www.loudthinking.com) – Broadcasting Brain [http://www.basecamphq.com](http://www.basecamphq.com) – Online project management [http://www.backpackit.com](http://www.backpackit.com) – Personal information manager [http://www.rubyonrails.com](http://www.rubyonrails.com) – Web-application framework ---
**Author:** ![Jang\_Choe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/cab0a1/32.png) [@Jang\_Choe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Jang_Choe)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2006, 5:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-on-rails-performance-question/62310/3 "2006-06-02T17:29:54Z")
On Jun 2, 2006, at 16:59, Marston A. wrote: > I’m wondering the same thing, so it will be great to have peoples > input > on this. Personally I have something similar setup but with much less > data than you, \< 100 rows and iterating via a table. My page actually > takes 6 seconds to load which I think is way to long. Less than 100 rows, that’s sounds strange. Can you reproduce that in a minimal example? – fxn ---
**Author:** ![Jang\_Choe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/cab0a1/32.png) [@Jang\_Choe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Jang_Choe)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2006, 6:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-on-rails-performance-question/62310/4 "2006-06-02T18:02:07Z")
David Heinemeier H. wrote: > > What I’m doing is getting about 5000+ records from a database and > > displaying all of it on a page. > > I would start by questioning why you would need to present 5K+ objects > on a single page. It would there are better ways to present massive > amounts of records than just to dump them all on one screen. Well who know what and how PHBs think. I personally think they’re only going to show 100 at a time, but they want it optimised enough so that 5000+ records can render in about 6-7 seconds. Or maybe they do want to show 5000+ at the same time for some crazy reason. We are a Java shop and we have application servers running that can pretty much do that (display 5000+ records in a very short amount of time). So I’m guess they want something comparable. > But if you must, I’d encourage you to go straight to the metal. Grab > the connection (ActiveRecord::Base.connection), then use select\_all to > get hashes back instead of AR objects. If that’s not fast enough, > investigate what methods your particular database adapter has for > returning records as arrays instead of as hashes. Wow, that worked really well. The benchmarks for rendering the view came down from 25 sec to about 7 seconds. That’s crazy. Thanks David. ---
**Author:** ![Jang\_Choe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/cab0a1/32.png) [@Jang\_Choe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Jang_Choe)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2006, 4:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-on-rails-performance-question/62310/5 "2006-06-02T16:59:45Z")
I’m wondering the same thing, so it will be great to have peoples input on this. Personally I have something similar setup but with much less data than you, \< 100 rows and iterating via a table. My page actually takes 6 seconds to load which I think is way to long.