Question

Im having a lot of latency running webrick on my development machine (localhost) .Anytime the browser makes a request, it takes the server about 8-9 seconds before it shows contents of the database, which contains just 34000 listings of text, output to the browser window.

I want to trouble shoot to find out whats happening.

Where should I start the process of troubleshooting?
I thought the first thing would be to monitor the web server logs to see requests.
But where can I find these on my development machine?

I know I can find the apache logs on my machine at

/var/log/apache2/access_log

but Rails doesnt run apache right? It runs webrick on port 3000

Please help.

Answer 1

When you run rails in development mode like:

rails s

..it usually runs WEBrick automatically as a foreground process and prints the type of information you’re looking for to the console for each client request. You can check/tune some of the logging parameters by editing:

config/environments/development.rb

As WEBrick is the default web server, Apache has nothing to do with it unless you’ve configured your environment to do so. As you mentioned, the default port is 3000.

Newer versions of Rails can also log the the database query plan automatically for queries taking a long time to return.

# Log the query plan for queries taking more than this (works

# with SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL)

config.active_record.auto_explain_threshold_in_seconds = 0.5

You should also check your specific database for proper indexing based on the schema and queries you’re trying to optimize.