Question

I’m getting close to deploying an application built on Rails 3.1.x and started running some performance tests. After fiddling with ab for a bit, I’m seeing some very discouraging results yielding around 15 requests / second on Heroku.

When testing locally I see similar results that really demonstrates that it’s an app issue more than anything.

I’m running Unicorn, which is about 40% faster than Thin on Celadon Cedar. Further, I’m using the PGSQL shared db.

I’m hopeful that someone could share a laundry list or essentially a launch checklist that I should move through when prepping an app for production and moving into the need for speed tuning. So far I’ve not found a real concise list of actionable items to move through that seems to make sense given my situation.

Or if you have solid practical experience moving through issues like this, any input would be appreciated!

Answer 1

I’ve spent some time tuning my app on heroku, and have spent some time working on performance tuning of Rails apps in a variety of settings.

When I run ab -n 300 -c 75 …myapp.com…. # which is a backup to my main site, and is on the free cedar plan with unicorn

Requests per second:    132.11 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       567.707 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       7.569 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

(this is against a home page that doesn’t do anything intense, so I’m providing it only as a “how fast could heroku be on the free plan with a very simple page?” example, not a “your apps should be this fast”)

Here is my Rails Performance Tuning 101 checklist:

1. Measure the browser/page load time first (the browser makes lots of requests, ab is only telling you about one of them, and usually your main page request is not the issue), get page load baseline numbers from tools like http://www.webpagetest.org or http://www.gtmetrix.com for the public facing pages, or browser tools Yslow, google page speed, or dynatrace for the private pages. If you look at the page load waterfall diagram (the ‘Net’ panel in chrome/firefox), it usually shows that your html loads quickly (under a sec), but then everything else takes 1-3 sec to load. Follow the Yslow/page speed recommendations on how to improve (make sure you are using the Rails 3.1 assets pipeline stuff to its full extent)

2. Read through your log files/new relic to find the sweet spot of the ‘slowest/most frequently hit’ request, and profile what happens for that request (is it slow ruby/lots of mem usage, or lots of queries?) You need to have a reliable way to detect and monitor performance issues, and not just go changing things at random. Once you have identified some target areas, create test scripts to help with before/after testing and prove that your change helps, and detect if a regression creeps in.

3. Lack of Indexes on db columns is one of the most common issues, and easiest to address. Run explain on the target queries, or look through your slow query log, to see what the query planner is doing. Add indexes for foreign keys, search columns, or primary data (covering index) as appropriate. Retest with actual production data to prove that it makes a difference. (you can run explain in heroku, as well as run queries for missing or unused indexes)

4. Most poor performing Rails apps suffer from N+1 queries because its so easy to write order.owner.address.city and not think about what happens when that’s in a loop. N+1 queries aren’t necessarily slow queries, so they don’t show up in the slow query log, its just that there are lots of them, and its more efficient to do it all at once. Use :include or .includes() for eager loading of that data, or look at doing your query another way.

5. Analyze the flow of your app and look for caching opportunities. If the user bounces back and forth between the index page and a details page, and back again, perhaps an ajax view of the details, without leaving the index page would give them the data they need in a faster way. I wrote some more thoughts about that on my blog

I gave a presentation on these techniques and other ideas in Chicago at this year’s WindyCityRails conference. You can see the video here on my http://www.RailsPerformance.com blog
What I love about heroku is that you have to be scalable from the start. When you look at the discussions on the mailing list, you see that most people are aware of the performance best practices, and how to get the most out of the server. I also like how you if you want to stay cheap, you learn how the performance tuning tricks that will get you the most bang.

Good luck!