Tips to speed up Rails app (thesis)?

Rails
1

Hi List,

For my thesis I’m currently investing how a Rails can be sped up.

I’ve already done :

  • caching
  • transactions
  • slow Ruby helpers manual written
  • include when doing a find

I’ve also tried to use Mongrel, but compared to Webrick my results
were slower (see http://users.telenet.be/jorambarrez/thesis/ ), can
anyone explain this?

Another question: how can I test concurrency with ab, when I have
authentication filters?

Any other thing I should try?

2

On Apr 19, 2007, at 3:29 PM, Joram wrote:

anyone explain this?

Another question: how can I test concurrency with ab, when I have
authentication filters?

Any other thing I should try?

You might want to try different template engines/erb implementations.

eg. I found a significant improvement when I switched an app to erubis:

James.

–
James S.
Play: http://james.anthropiccollective.org
Work: http://jystewart.net/process/

3

The platform you run on makes a huge difference. Ruby is slow on
Windows,
for example. On a Windows system, Mongrel and WEBrick are equivalent.
The
major difference is that Mongrel continues to work for more than a few
hours
:slight_smile:

You’ll find that mongrel, webrick, fcgi, etc will perform around the
same.
The important thing you need to think about is using more than one
server.

For example, page caching is great, but if you’re using Mongrel to serve
the
cached pages, you’re not getting all of the benefits that page caching
provides. You want a static web server to serve your static content
(images,
js, stylesheets, html files), Reserve Mongrel for handling the actual
requests. See Apache + mod_proxy_balance + Mongrel_cluster or
nginx+mongrel_cluster.

4

Thanks for the replies!

I’m running both webrick and mongrel on ubuntu.
I also have a server thats running for almost 3 weeks now, on webrick
production.
So Brian, If I understand you correctly, there should be no big
differences between mongrel/webrick,
but mongrel can be better used concurrently?

The apache combination is something I will look in to!

5

Yeah… but to put it better… webrick is not meant for production.
It’s
just not designed for it and will usually choke under load.

Rails is single-threaded… if you have only one mongrel running, you
can
only process one request at a time. That’s why we load-balance. (It’s
not as
bad as it sounds though, as most requests happen quickly. 2 is decent,
4 is
really good, I think I read that twitter uses something like 16 or
something?

I don’t know what tool you’re using for your tests, but you might also
want
to consider httperf.

In fact, there’s a great screen cast on benchmarking that you should
pick
up. It only costs $9 and is quite awesome.

http://peepcode.com/products/benchmarking-with-httperf