Ruby Performance Optimization

Chapter 8Test Performance

As experienced software developers, we know that testing is the best way to ensure that our code works as advertised. When you first write the code, a test proves that it does what you think it does. When you fix a bug, the test prevents it from happening again.

I’m a big fan of applying the same approach for performance. What if we write tests that first set the expected level of performance, and then make sure that performance doesn’t degrade below this level? Sounds like a good idea, right?

I learned about this concept while working on Acunote. We started Acunote when Rails was at version 1.0, so performance was a huge concern. Performance testing helped us not only to understand and improve application performance, ...