[LRUG] Recommendations for Ruby & Rails optimisation resources

[Tom Stuart]

On 23 Nov 2012, at 12:14, Jonathon Horsman wrote:
> I need to improve the performance of a particular Rails action.

Kind of a lowbrow suggestion, but have you tried tweaking the GC parameters? If you're using REE or Ruby 1.9.3, you can set environment variables which influence how often the GC runs, which can dramatically improve performance at the expense of using more memory.

It's been a while since I fiddled with it, but AFAIK Evan Weaver was the first to blog about it at http://blog.evanweaver.com/2009/04/09/ruby-gc-tuning/, and at the time it was by far the simplest way to wring more performance out of allocation-heavy code.

http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/documentation.html#_garbage_collector_performance_tuning has some (stale?) information and example settings too.

Cheers,
-Tom