Optimizing Rails

Optimising a framework is a very different job than optimising your rails application. You can’t just ‘throw memcache in front of it’ or disable features. The benchmarks you choose will also drastically affect your results, potentially leading to pointless optimisations that don’t help real users. The rails 2.0 release contained significant performance improvements for common slow areas, and the 2.1 release will contain more still.

This talk will cover the methodology used for benchmarking and profiling; the problem areas that were discovered; and the fixes that were applied. It will also address some common myths and misunderstandings about what’s slow in rails. Attendees will learn common problem-areas, ways to avoid them and how to help out with the optimisation work taking place in rails. The profiling and optimisation techniques used will also help with improving the performance of their own libraries and applications.