Posts tagged performance

Asset bundling in Rails

May 8th

Posted by James Stewart in Notes

No comments

I stumbled across James Herdman’s piece on asset bundling in rails earlier this week. I’d always presumed you could do this but never got round to investigating as very few of my projects load in very large numbers of JS/CSS assets.

In the end it was quite timely as I’ve been trying to reduce the footprint of an app I’ve recently inherited that is using far too many plugins. With this technique it was very straightforward to remove the asset_packager library. Now, what else can I eliminate…?

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Selected (belated, extended) Saturday Links

Mar 28th

Posted by James Stewart in Notes

The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape.

  • Making a jQuery Plugin Truly Customizable » Learning jQuery – Tips, Techniques, Tutorials

    Some nice tips for managing options, and a reminder to find _useful_ customisations not just load with customisation options without much thought about/consultation with other potential users

  • iPhone Coding For Web Developers

    Presentation slides from the internet's Matt Biddulph

  • Rack::Test released: Simply test any Rack-compatible app — Bryan Helmkamp

    There's a _lot_ to like about increased adoption of rack. "With Rack::Test, we hope to make it easy for frameworks to encourage their users to write tests by making it trivial to provide a testing environment. We’d like to foster compatibility between Ruby web app testing environments (especially important as ideas like multi-framework apps become more prominent). The philosophy is the library should stay small and extendable so frameworks can layer on additional functionality they want to offer without modifying Rack::Test’s core behavior or resorting to monkeypatching."

  • Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

    "That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen …. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify." … and a a lot more

  • russell davies: newspapers and all that

    "If we are going to create a new news ecosystem involving advertisers (and a lot of people would be grateful for that money) then we're going to have to do something about that institutional bifurcation between content and commerce. We're going to have to design the relationship between the two with the care of a good experience designer." – a response to Ben Hammersley asking if anyone talking about the future of newspapers had talked to anyone in advertising

  • Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors – Laughing Meme

    "Simon Willison asked this week about best practice for architecting activity streams. And the answer is, “It depends.” Depends on the scope, scale, access patterns, and affordances you’re building — your contract with your users.

    Which is a long way of saying think hard about the promises you make to your users, implicitly or explicitly.

    And, Facebook, my friend, what the HELL are you thinking? You managed to negotiate the best deal in the business, talk about a racket, and you threw it away for a piece of Twitter’s pain? Are you stupid? Well, best of luck with that."

  • SXSW Interactive Videos and Podcasts | SXSW.com

    Most of the sessions were recorded and this is the place to get hold of them.

  • SXSWi: Location-based service is the trend at Austin, Texas |

    "Predictably, location-based services were a major feature this year, with launches that included Foursquare, a social, location-based game by the Dodgeball creator, Dennis Crowley, and a new Facebook application for the location management tool Fire Eagle. While early adopters such as the SXSWers have been exploring location-based services for some time, it is inevitable that more consumer and privacy-friendly versions will start to creep into the mainstream."

  • stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

    "I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago." … and …" Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link."

  • On running a panel

    A mixup over bus times meant I didn't make it to Andrew's panel at SxSW, but I heard many good things. It's really great to see this kind of debriefing-in-public going on. Hopefully it'll make for a stronger set of talks and panels next year.

  • Guardian API Maps – Home

    "This is a site that lets you search the Guardian's new API and add location information to articles. All the place data we collect is being made available to anyone who wants it."

  • Foursquare, Hot New Phone App, Is Dodgeball on Steroids | The New York Observer

    Quite a few people seemed to be playing with Foursquare at SxSW but most of the Brits were excluded as we didn't want to use that much data and it wasn't available in the UK iTunes store. One to watch, though.

  • A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform

    I saw Simon present the Guardian Platform at SxSW and it looks like a great achievement. Waiting to see what developers build on it, and how they roll some of the ideas back in

  • Taking remote imagery offline to Nigeria :: High Earth Orbit

    Andrew's notes on trying to source good map data for use in Nigeria. It's a useful overview of a variety of services and ways to use them, though highlighting the absence of really accessible, high-quality data.

  • Pulse Laser: The Utility of the Unfinished

    "One technique that S&W has been using recently to illustrate design work is placing sketches or wireframes in situ. Whilst wireframes themselves are incomplete artefacts, designed to be work in progress, they still suffer for being uniformly incomplete. Wireframes themselves can be almost too beautiful, and this means that it becomes all-too-easy to criticise them as only wireframes, rather than as part of a product that exists in the world. Contextualising the sketches into the photograph places the design into the world. This enables the design to be understood within the world, and also (importantly) to highlight the seams between the unfinished design and the finished world around it"

  • Spike: a log file viewing & (if we’re being generous) analysis tool for Rails developers.

    Looks like a handy addition to the toolkit

  • Generation Open | FactoryCity

    "Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity." – Perhaps an overly optimistic piece, but it connects together a number of current themes and we can hope…

  • Testing Facebook with Cucumber | opensoul.org

    For those faced with the unpleasant task of writing facebook apps, some people are working on making sure they can be thoroughly tested.

  • scraplab : instant sinatra deployment with heroku

    A lot of people seem to be excited about heroku lately, and it does look like a nice simple way to put up quick ruby apps. Must play soon.

  • How to speed up gem installs 10x « The Budding Rubyist

    Handy little tip, particularly for server environments: turn off ri and rdoc generation in your .gemrc file, and speed things up considerably

  • Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden – O'Reilly Radar

    A more positive spin on facebook's changes from David O'Recordon, who suspects they're going to pull down the walls around their garden and become a proper citizen of the open web.

  • Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong. – broadstuff

    Critical commentary on facebook's recent changes. I'm not sure I entirely agree with statements like "By 2009 it was clear no one gives a sh*t about the Social Graph" but facebook really do seem to be finding that their approach is overly complex and quickly trying to shift to a more twitter-like "web of flow" (to steal Stowe Boyd's phrase)

  • Acquia Search goes public beta | Acquia

    Hosted solr for drupal: "Acquia Search can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site, and enhances a site's search experience with faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting, all delivered through a redundant hosted service infrastructure.".

  • Oauth using pecl/OAuth

    Looks like a nice simple way to interact with oauth from a PHP app

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Selected Saturday Links

Mar 7th

Posted by James Stewart in Notes

Big themes this week have mostly revolved around twitter, facebook, and openness. Some have focussed on facebook redesigning to embrace a more twitter-like “web of flow” approach, and others on the fact that they’re jumping on various open web bandwagons. It’s been interesting to see some tie in with the government transparency thinking going around, as particularly noted by Chris Messina on FactoryCity. Meanwhile there are quite a few nice new tools emerging, and I really must try heroku one of these days.

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Speeding up Rails with erubis

Feb 13th

Posted by James Stewart in Notes

However much we buy into the adage that hardware is cheaper than developers, we all still need to make our code as responsive as possible. We tune the database, we refactor our code, and try to find the optimum balance between developer time, code legibility, and performance. In the process, many of us have found that rails’ rendering, particularly the Erb library is one of its slowest parts. Enter Erubis.

Erubis is an implementation of eRuby that replaces Erb. It‘s written in C and claims to be three times faster than Erb, and 10% faster than its nearest competitor (eruby from mod_ruby which isn’t recommended for use with rails apps). I’ve been trying it out over the past few days, initially with version 2.1 and today with 2.2, and it seemed like time for a report.

Updating an existing rails app is pretty straightforward. I’ve heard that there are some issues to watch out for, but mostly all it takes to convert an existing app is to follow the simple instructions and add:

require 'erubis/helpers/rails_helper'

inside your environment.rb file. Then restart the server, and away you go.

I’ve been testing it out on an app that is fairly early in its lifecycle and hasn’t yet seen much tuning. The app suffers from running too many database queries, but even so it spends more of its time in the rendering than in the database. Running locally off one mongrel I found that, I tested using ‘ab’ from a parallels virtual machine, and found that over 250 requests my standard setup got 7.55 requests/second. Switching to Erubis made little difference to that, which came as quite a surprise.

I then tried applying the patch to rails that the documentation offers as an optional extra. That’s when I saw the real performance leap. Just that change pushed the app up to 13.02 requests/second. I tried it again, and saw 16.29 requests/second. Not quite three times the speed, but doubles not something to be sniffed at. There’s just the small matter of patching rails, which isn’t my first choice as I like to keep this app in step with edge.

But of course this is ruby, so there are alternatives to patching. We can add the new methods in environment.rb before we require the erubis helper and it’ll do the same job.

module ActionView
  class Base
    def convert_template_into_ruby_code(template)
      ERB.new(template, nil, @@erb_trim_mode).src
    end
 
    # Create source code for given template
    def create_template_source(extension, template, render_symbol, locals)
      if template_requires_setup?(extension)
        body = case extension.to_sym
          when :rxml
            "controller.response.content_type ||= 'application/xml'\n" +
            "xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:indent => 2)\n" +
            template
          when :rjs
            "controller.response.content_type ||= 'text/javascript'\n" +
            "update_page do |page|\n#{template}\nend"
        end
      else
        body = convert_template_into_ruby_code(template)
      end
 
      @@template_args[render_symbol] ||= {}
      locals_keys = @@template_args[render_symbol].keys | locals
      @@template_args[render_symbol] = locals_keys.inject({}) { |h, k| h[k] = true; h }
 
      locals_code = ""
      locals_keys.each do |key|
        locals_code < < "#{key} = local_assigns[:#{key}]\n"
      end
 
      "def #{render_symbol}(local_assigns)\n#{locals_code}#{body}\nend"
    end
  end
end

So far, I’m impressed.

Update (17th Feb): I had misread the information and not understood that it is written entirely in ruby. And apparently 2.2 doesn’t have the same issues in rails that 2.1 had.

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