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Don't load stuff you don't need

Posted 28 Nov 2005

Using Rails 0.14 and onward, you can give your app a slight performance boost by not loading parts of the framework that you don't need. For example, if you don't expose parts of your app as a web service, then you don't need to load actionwebservice. Likewise, if you don't send mail from your app, you don't need to load actionmailer. If you're using the Rails initializer to start your app, you can do it like so: 
Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  # Skip frameworks you're not going to use
  config.frameworks -= [ :action_web_service, :action_mailer ]
  ...
end
If you're still using an old environment.rb, just comment out the corresponding require lines: 
# Require Rails libraries.
require 'active_support'
require 'active_record'
require 'action_controller'
# require 'action_mailer'
# require 'action_web_service'
Additionally, you should also load only the database adapters for the database(s) which you are using. Add the following to your environment.rb, before Rails gets required: 
RAILS_CONNECTION_ADAPTERS = %w(mysql)
By default, Rails will load all connection adapters it can find. Minimizing your code footprint will speed up Rails, because Ruby traverses all abstract syntax trees stored on the heap during garbage collection. If you can avoid loading significantly sized code, you will reduce the memory footprint of your app, thereby speeding up garbage collection. It might also help to increase object lookup at runtime due to smaller sized data structures containing meta information.

Posted in performance | Tags GC

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