High Performance Ruby on Rails and MySQL

MySQL is among the fastest relational databases commonly available today; unfortunately, the database alone is only part of the picture. For today’s web applications, the one weak link in the entire performance chain – from the network to the web application and ending in the database – can cause an entire application to seem slow.

Unfortunately, Ruby on Rails on exacerbates this problem: Rails makes it easy to develop complicated web applications fast, but it also makes it easy to access your databases in an extremely inefficient manner. Thousands of queries may be generated when just a few are necessary. Even if you can get past that problem, ActiveRecord itself can be a problem: it may create thousands or even millions of objects, and in many situations – such as bulk loading or updating data – this can cause a serious performance problem. Replacing ActiveRecord in key situations can result in the length of batch process going from days to minutes.

This talk will demonstrate the following for your attendees:

• What kind of performance problems am I likely to run into with Rails?

• How can I tell if Rails is responsible for my performance problems?

• What specific techniques can I use to reduce the number of queries and the size of ActiveRecord objects returned?

• What are some real world examples of ActiveRecord speedup using these techniques?