[LRUG] Ruby on Rails - performance tuning advice

[Rory Sinclair]

Hi,

We’ve been doing some performance enhancement of our platform lately, which is a two-tier architecture (JSON API backend, Rails frontend web app).  Here’s whats helped:

On the client tier:

- using the yslow plugin for Firebug to identify things we needed to tweak on the web side (CDN for static assets, using a separate domain for assets, etc)

- reducing quality on large images to get the sizes down - this was a big deal, since all the usual ‘lossless’ compression tools were saving us next to nothing

- caching API responses - shared cache for public stuff / stuff thats the same for all users, and a per-user cache for ‘private’ stuff

- prefetching API endpoint data in parallel to warm caches

On the API back-end tier:

- using Ruby-Prof - https://github.com/ruby-prof/ruby-prof - to spit out useful HTML graphs of where time is being spent

- using Bullet - https://github.com/flyerhzm/bullet - to identify cases where we should be eager loading but weren’t

- JMeter to hit every API endpoint multiple times concurrently, and graph average response times to identify

- generally reducing cruft, simplifying code paths, auditing code to ensure we’re not doing unnecessary work, etc

Thanks Graham for the tip about Rack Mini Profiler - will check that out.

Regards

--  
Rory Sinclair
Head of Technology
ASMALLWORLD


On Wednesday, 26 March 2014 at 15:14, Graham Ashton wrote:

> On 26 Mar 2014, at 14:02, Nicholas Martin <nic_i_like_to_ at hotmail.com (mailto:nic_i_like_to_ at hotmail.com)> wrote:
>  
> > However, the challenge is finding what things will give us the best results.  For example, in the work we have done so far, code changes to aggregate data have helped a lot, caching less so.
>  
> As others have already said, you need to measure things before you act.
>  
> The best tool I've come across for measuring performance of Rails apps is Rack MiniProfiler.
>  
> https://github.com/miniprofiler/rack-mini-profiler
>  
> I recommend watching the RailsCast to get yourself up to speed.
>  
> It's so quick and easy to install and use that I run it permanently in development, which helps me avoid big performance related oversights when building new features.
>  
> You'll obviously get different performance characteristics in production, with production hardware and the real users' data. Unlike most profiling tools, Rack MiniProfiler has been designed to run in production too.
>  
> > Any advice, based on experience would be most appreciated.  Any form would be of interest, from a short reply, to a chat over a coffee or even potentially a day or so of consultancy.
>  
> I'd be happy to take a look at it on a consultancy basis if you like – ping me an email if you're interested. I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of hours with the profiler highlighted your low hanging fruit though...
>  
> Cheers,
> Graham
>  
>  
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