I am looking to speed up my rails application and am working through all
the SQL queries and trying to remove unnecessary queries.
I thought of the following and would love to hear whether it is
possible.
I have one (smallish - about 40 records) table which only gets read by
my app - no writing. It gets read a lot though. Would it be possible to
preload this table into memory (as a kind of global global dataset) when
the server starts up? This would save me at least one sql query on every
server trip.
Is this even necessary? Maybe rails - (or the database?) automatically
caches things like this?
Rails does some class caching in the default production environment.
There's more you can do though. It depends on what kind of website you
have. If you only serve semi-static content, caching your pages (or
parts of it) will improve your speed incredibly. No queries will be
made until something's updated (mind that you will have to expire
certain cache elements on changes in the database).
If you do a lot of searching, caching the pages will probably not work
for you or only do the trick partly. Do you use indexing in your
database? Using indexes can make database actions much faster.
I have done something similar with a small data set that was being referenced a lot. In the end however the improvement, whilst noticeable, was not that significant.
Does this data set used as it is or is it transformed before use?
If so it might make sense to cache the transformed data or even the pages as as been suggested.
Thanks for the ideas. Some good stuff here to look into.
After thinking about this a bit more I'd like to slightly rephrase my
question:
Is it possible to create variables in the rails environment that persist
globally - not as sessions - that would be too much porting of
information forwards and back. In any case the data needs to be visible
'between' sessions as well.
In old style Visual Basic ASP there was a file called global.asa where
one could define variables that were always available to all sessions.
Is there a similar thing in rails?
Is it possible to create variables in the rails environment that persist
globally - not as sessions - that would be too much porting of
information forwards and back.
This is possible by global variables in ruby (variables starts with
@@ )
In any case the data needs to be visible
'between' sessions as well.
But this needs the data to be stored in D B it self. Is it?
Thanks for the info - I will look in to the @@ idea
In any case the data needs to be visible
'between' sessions as well.
But this needs the data to be stored in D B it self. Is it?
Yes - The data is currently in a table in the database - it is a table
of rights users have under different conditions. These rights wont
change for weeks on end, so reading them from the database every time
the user tries to do something is silly. I want these rights to be kept
in the memory of the server all the time. In other words - when the web
server is started - get the rights from the database and keep them in
memory forever (or until the server is restarted) Whenever a request
comes in from a user - check the right against memory instead of against
the database.
Is the environment.rb and the production/development/test files executed
every time a request comes in or only when the server starts up? If it
is the latter I should be able to create variables there that are
visible 'across' session?
I would not go for this sort of optimisation unless you know that you
have a performance issue. It may seem unnecessary to access the db
each time but the data will be cached by the db server so the overhead
should be minimal. It is most unlikely that this will turn out to be
a significant part of your request turnaround time.
Is it possible to create variables in the rails environment that persist
globally - not as sessions - that would be too much porting of
information forwards and back.
This is possible by global variables in ruby (variables starts with
@@ )
No, those are class variables. Global variable names start with
different characters in Ruby. If you really want to know what, you can
look it up, but I'm not going to make it easier to implement a bad idea.
And global variables *are* a bad idea. In Rails, they're not even
reliable for maintaining global state, because they're only global to
each server instance. Just forget they exist.
In any case the data needs to be visible
'between' sessions as well.
But this needs the data to be stored in D B it self. Is it?
Thanks for the help - and the warning. I got the global variable thing
working - in principle - but now rails complains that I cannot do
something like
$rights = Rights.find(:all)
in environment.rb
I'm giving it up for a bad job - (not that I need to squeeze the last
drop of performance out of the system yet) I think I'll stick to reading
from the db every time as you suggest. (There is probably already
caching of the table going on in the background in any case)
I take the point that global variables are not stable enough, but it
still strikes me as wasteful having to constantly access a small table
which I know is not changing - millions of times more disk access and
processor cycles than just reading it when the web server starts up and
tagging it along in memory.
But then - I am the first to admit that I am not really qualified to be
making these statements
Thanks again for the assistance. You guys are great!
