Question

I’ve got a fancy-schmancy “worksheet” style view in a Rails app that is taking way too long to load. (In dev mode, and yes I know there’s no caching there, “Completed in 57893ms (View: 54975, DB: 855)”) The worksheet is rendered using helper methods, because I couldn’t stand maintaining umpteen teeny little partials for the different sorts of rows in the worksheet. Now I’m wondering whether partials might actually be faster?

I’ve profiled the page load and identified a few cases where object caching will shave a few seconds off, but the profile output suggests that a large chunk of time is spent simply looping through the Worksheet model’s constituent objects and appending the string output from the helper. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

def header_row(wksht)
  content_tag(:thead, :class => "ioe") do
    content_tag(:tr) do
      html_row = []
      for i in (0...wksht.class::NUM_COLS) do
        html_row << content_tag(:th, h(wksht.column_headings[i].upcase),
                                :class => wksht.column_classes[i])
      end
      html_row.join("\n")
    end
  end
end

OTOH using partials means opening files, spinning off the Ruby interpreter, and in the long run, aggregating a bunch of strings, right? So I’m wondering whether there is another way to speed things up in the helpers. Should I be using something like a stringstream (does that exist in Ruby?), should I get rid of content_tag calls in favor of my own “” string interpolation… I’m willing to write my own performance tests, and share the results, if you have any suggested alternatives to the approach I’ve already taken.

As it’s a fairly complex view (and has an editable version as well), I’d rather not rewrite-and-profile the whole thing more than once. 🙂

Some related reading:

http://www.viget.com/extend/helpers-vs-partials-a-performance-question/ (old)
http://www.breakingpointsystems.com/community/blog/ruby-string-processing-overhead/
http://blog.purepistos.net/index.php/2008/07/14/benchmarking-ruby-string-interpolation-concatenation-and-appending/

@tadman:
There are row totals and column totals (and more columnar arithmetic), and since they’re not all just totals, but also depend on other “magic numbers” from the database, I implemented them in the Ruby code rather than Javascript. (DRY and unit testable.) Javascript is used only in the edit view, and just to add/delete rows (client side only) and to fetch a sheet with fresh totals when the cell contents change. It fetches the whole table because nearly half of the values get updated when an input cell changes.

The worksheet and its rows are actually virtual models; they don’t live in the DB, but rather aggregate a boatload of real AR objects. They get created every time a view renders (but that takes 1.7 secs in dev mode, so I’m not worried about it).

I suppose I could transmit a matrix of numbers, rather than marked-up content, and have JS unpack it into the sheet. But that gets unmaintainable fast.

Answer 1

I ended up reading an excellent article at http://www.infoq.com/articles/Rails-Performance (“A Look At Common Performance Problems In Rails”). Then I followed the author’s suggestion to cache computations during request processing:

def estimated_costs
  @estimated_costs ||=
    begin
      # tedious vector math
    end
end

Because my worksheet does stuff like the above over and over, and then builds on those results to calculate some more rows, this resulted in a 90% speedup right off the bat. Should have been plain as day, but it started with just a few totals, then I showed the prototype to the customer, and it snowballed from there 🙂

I also wondered whether my array-based math might be inefficient, so I replaced the Ruby Arrays of numbers with NArray (http://narray.rubyforge.org/). The speedup was negligible but the code’s cleaner, so it’s staying that way.

Finally, I put some object caching in place. The “magic numbers” in the database only change a few times a year at most, and some of them are encrypted, but they need to be used in most of the calculations. That’s low-hanging fruit ripe for caching, and it shaved off another 1.25 seconds.

I’ll look at eager loading of associations next, as there’s probably some time to save there, and I’ll do a quick comparison of sending “just the data” vs sending the HTML, as @tadman suggested. About the only partial I can cache is the navigation sidebar. All of the other content depends on the request parameters.

Thanks for your suggestions!