Railsway 09 -- Rails performance

Notes from RailsWay 2009 on perceived performance, HTTP caching, and Rails caching.

Published

2009-05-27

Reading time

1 min read

• #ruby
• #rails
• #performance
• #caching
• #conference

Perceptive performance is more important than application performance.

• Use yslow
• Use ETags and Last-Modified together
• Use Expires in situation where it is possible (batch generated pages)
• Tools: squid-cache.ord, varnish, akamai, Rack-Cache (<- !)
• When you’ve used HTTP caching to it’s limits, still there is Rails Caching
• Use Fragment Caching for expensive partials
• Use Action Caching
• Use Model Caching (available trough various plugins)
• Memchached is kind of self healing
• Cache Generation is very important, even more important is the generation of the cache key (combination of ‘name’, ‘unique identifier’, ‘kind of a version number’)

def handle_etag
  fresh_when :etag => [@user.id, @user.updated_at]
end

• Last-Modified

def handle_last_modified
  fresh_when :last_modified => last_updated_time
end