Professional Ruby on Rails™

Chapter 13. Performance

If you are lucky, when your web application goes out into the world, it will be used. Users are lovely people in general, but they tend to have some specific expectations about the responsiveness of a web application — expectations that have been honed from years of using Google. Of course, Google has spent millions of dollars on server farms the size of football fields while you have two Linux boxes on a rack in a back room somewhere.

This chapter tackles strategies for keeping your web application's performance up to speed. You'll look at some mechanisms for identifying under-performing code, and then examine common bottlenecks and performance issues in Rails applications.