Wednesday 28 September 2011

Suffering Rails3 slowdown

We've just pushed our Rails 3 upgraded app to production... and are suffering a massive slowdown in insert/update speed over Rails 2.
At the moment I am not sure of the exact cause of this.

It *might* be mysql inserts, though I can't quite see why that would be.

It *might* be because this new version we are using vestal_versions to track changes.

It might be because the moon is in the house of Mars for all I know!

I hate getting stung by unknowns. The speed on our test environment is tolerable, slightly slower than the rails 2 version, but I was willing to accept that because the new version is doing so much more.

Bench-marking is one thing.. but know why the bench marks are slower is the key!

Monday 26 September 2011

Expiring fragments from daemons

We have an application that gets its data from a series of daemons that go out and read in data. This works great, except, we are caching pages. And I'd like to expire those pages based on an update.
It turns out that an Observer doesn't have access to expire_action or fragment. And a Sweeper is not called from data-only (i.e non-controller) updates! Buggers!

But there is a solution. You can call the sweeper directly from your importer:

MySweeper.instance.clean_up(model_instance)

This works, except I couldn't get it reliably to expire the actions. So, I used direct calls to Rails.cache.delete to do this.

Thinking about it, I guess I could then have just written an observer! As those do get called from controller-less updates.