How to speed up ActiveResource?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all,

I've been experimenting with sharing resources between 2 rails apps with AR and I just love it. The only downside is that when using AR, my app slows down dramastically.

Is there a way to speed things up? Some special caching mechanisme that needs to be enabled?

Thank you in advance for the information.

2

Robert Walker wrote:

Michael Rigart wrote:

Hi all,

I've been experimenting with sharing resources between 2 rails apps with AR and I just love it. The only downside is that when using AR, my app slows down dramastically.

Is there a way to speed things up? Some special caching mechanisme that needs to be enabled?

Thank you in advance for the information.

Are you running in development mode or production mode?

Just need to get this question out of the way first.

Hi Robert

I' running in production. I have noticed that development is slower then production, but the production speed is still far from acceptable. The diffrence between using ActiveRecord and ActiveResource is huge.

3

Michael Rigart wrote:

I' running in production. I have noticed that development is slower then production, but the production speed is still far from acceptable. The diffrence between using ActiveRecord and ActiveResource is huge.

Yep, web services are generally much slower than SQL calls. There a lot more work to do. Think about something like the Music store built into iTunes that uses web services heavily. It's not exactly stellar performance.

Who knows. Things like the work going into Rails 2.3 with RACK and METAL may provide some opportunity to optimize ActiveResource, but I doubt we'll ever see comparable performance between ActiveRecord (or other ORMs) and ActiveResource. Improvements to ActiveResource will likely go hand-in-hand with improvements to ActiveRecord so the gap will remain.

Can you define "huge?" Do you have any benchmarks. That might help people here know whether it's really a problem or just basically "normal."

4

Robert Walker wrote:

Michael Rigart wrote:

I' running in production. I have noticed that development is slower then production, but the production speed is still far from acceptable. The diffrence between using ActiveRecord and ActiveResource is huge.

Yep, web services are generally much slower than SQL calls. There a lot more work to do. Think about something like the Music store built into iTunes that uses web services heavily. It's not exactly stellar performance.

Who knows. Things like the work going into Rails 2.3 with RACK and METAL may provide some opportunity to optimize ActiveResource, but I doubt we'll ever see comparable performance between ActiveRecord (or other ORMs) and ActiveResource. Improvements to ActiveResource will likely go hand-in-hand with improvements to ActiveRecord so the gap will remain.

Can you define "huge?" Do you have any benchmarks. That might help people here know whether it's really a problem or just basically "normal."

Thank you Robert. I know that web services will always be slower then connecting directly to the DB. But I have worked with external webservices from third parties and my webservice is way to slow.

I have tested it again with a small benchmark by pulling a list of 50 items and displaying them. It took 28733ms to pull the data over and display them on screen.

I know it's not a server or network problem.

Thank you in for your patience