[LRUG] Ruby on Rails - performance tuning advice

[Rory Sinclair]

We tried out Newrelic a long while back, but we found it was leaking memory in production, which was non-ideal.  I’m sure its better nowadays though.

--  
Rory Sinclair
Head of Technology
ASMALLWORLD


On Wednesday, 26 March 2014 at 17:24, Hemant Kumar wrote:

> Using newrelic also is a good idea for performance tuning a Rails application. I usually use them as high level bottleneck finder in various code paths. Works pretty well.
>  
> Once past that, I use a low level profiler if need be for further tuning of my application.   
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Rory Sinclair <rory at asmallworld.net (mailto:rory at asmallworld.net)> wrote:
> > 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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>  
> --  
> Cheers
> Hemant
> Co founder - http://www.codemancers.com
> http://twitter.com/gnufied
>  
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