If I’m working on the topic page, it’s a performance sensitive area, then maybe I may opt to skip ActiveRecord and just use MiniSql.Īs for using Ruby patterns, I don’t go and write while loops just because I hate blocks and I know that blocks are a little bit slower. For example, when I think of a user flow that I’m working on, it could be one that the user will visit once a month, or it could be one an extremely busy route like the topic page. Well, I’ll avoid ActiveRecord sometimes if I have something performance sensitive. Sam Saffron: That’s an interesting question. The other thing would be to spend more time on memory.Īre there any Ruby features or patterns that you generally avoid for performance reasons? Just to summarize, I wish we looked at what big pain points consumers in the ecosystem are having and just set the agenda based on that. I wish the community would focus more on memory. We see these memory issues in our hosting as well, our CPUs are usually doing okay, but memory is where we have issues. It’s a huge difference to adoption for us whether we can run on a 512MB system versus 1024MB. When looking at adoption of Discourse, a lot of it depends on the people being able to run it on very cheap servers and they’re very constrained on memory. And when I think about performance for us at Discourse, the biggest pain is memory, not CPU. I think one area that Ruby can get better at, is finding the actual real production bottlenecks that people are seeing out there, and working towards solving them. And it’s easy just to look at micro bench and make something 20 times faster, but in the big scheme of things you may not be fixing the right thing. It’s very tempting, in performance, just to look at a micro bench.
A lot of times, I can feel that as a community we’re not focusing necessarily on the right thing. I think the big problem that we have is resources and focus. DHH is also very interested in improving performance of Ruby. Sam Saffron: I think there are a lot of members of the community that are very keen to improve performance. What do you think are the actual problems? And do you think the community is on the right track to fix this reputation? Ruby has a bad reputation when it comes to performance. He also participated in an AMA and answered the top voted questions submitted by Shopifolk which we are sharing here. Sam visited Shopify in Ottawa and talked to us about Discourse’s approach to Ruby performance and monitoring. He has written extensively about various performance topics on and is dedicated to ensuring Discourse keeps running fast.
Sam Saffron is a co-founder of Discourse and the creator of the mini_profiler, memory_profiler, mini_mime and mini_racer gems.
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