Posted 04 Nov 2005
You really shouldn’t be using Pstore for Rails. Apart from the fact that it doesn’t scale to a setup with more than 1 box, it is much slower than using the database for session storage, for example.
Using a Mysql session store can be up to 90% faster. Under, Linux, that is.
If you’re on a Windows box, the difference can be staggering: up to 560%!
Posted 03 Nov 2005
Rails version 0.14 and upward contain a massive performance improvement for pagination. Most of it is free and any app will benefit from it without even knowing.
However, there's also a little api addition to the pagination helper module, which can be used to speed up your paginated pages even more, if necessary.
We're talking about pagination_links_each. It takes the same parameters as pagination_links but instead of calling link_to to create the html code for each link, it yields the page number to a block. It is the block's responsibility to create the html code for the link.
So for example, you could write
pagination_links_each(pages, :window_size => 4) do |n|
"<a href='?page=#{n}'>#{n}</a>"
end
instead of
pagination_links(pages, :window_size => 4)
The first version is faster than the second one, because it avoids creating lots of intermediate data structures to generate the html code. Additionally, the created html is shorter and less data gets transmitted over the wire. And the code will work for any page embedding it.
The speedup obtained will of course depend on your app. Here's some data for paginated pages of my application, showing speedups ranging from 11 to 26%. Quite an improvement for adding one line of code!
Posted 02 Nov 2005
So finally I managed to get me a place in the blogosphere. Hey!
The main purpose of this blog will be to keep a log of (my) activities related to improving performance of the Rails web application framework.
A good deal of work already went into performance improvement since realease 0.12.1. To sum it up: I managed to improve the throughput of a recipe database application by a factor of 4 since I started this work, going from around 50 requests per second to over 220 requests per seconds.
In order to ease performance measurements of Rails applications, I have developed the package railsbench. It really does make performance regression tests easy, so give it try!
And stay tuned for further improvements :-)