installing sunport_rails on ubuntu production

We've added search functionality to Toygaroo with Solr via sunspot_rails.

If you are going to install it on Ubuntu then make sure you do:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

First!

Using the html5 boilerplate and rails 3

I am experimenting with using the html5 boilerplate with rails 3.0x. It is an interesting setup. I am using Russ Frisch's html5 boilerplate template, but updating it to use the latest boilerplate code.

It seems to be a pretty nice way of getting your css and js ducks in a row. Over the next few days I need to see how it handles having jquery mobile in the mix. I am also not 100% sure how to use a some sort of grid layout template (like 960 or 114opx) with it. Or even if you should!

We shall see.

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!

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.

meta_search sort_link helper and associations

It took me a while to find this, so, for my own memory I am going to quickly write this up.

I have a view that shows a table of objects (a pretty standard index view). The only issue was I want to sort on one of the columns that actually has data coming not from the main object but an association.
What I discovered is a line in a posting here that says:

You can define your own custom sort scopes. Define scopes named “sort_by__asc” and “sort_by__desc” and sort_link @search, :name will work as you might expect.

So, I have an object of 'info' defined like this:

class Info < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :region
  scope :contains_string, lambda {|str| where(:name.matches % "%#{str}%")}
  search_methods :contains_string

  scope :active, lambda{where(:active => true)}
  search_methods :active, :type => :boolean
end

What I found is that you can put this at the end:

scope :sort_by_region_name, lambda{joins(:region).order("regions.name asc")}
search_methods :sort_by_region_name

and then in my view I can do:

<table>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <td width="25%"><%= sort_link @info_search, :name, "Info" %></td>
            <td width="25%"><%= sort_link @info_search, :region_name, "Region" %></td>
            <td><%= sort_link @info_search, :active %></td>
        </tr>
    </thead>
        ...body info...
</table

And in my controller:

class Admin::InfosController < Admin::BaseController
  def index
    search = params[:search] || {"meta_sort" => "name.asc"}

    @info_search = Info.search(search)
    @infos = @linfo_search.paginate(:page => params[:page]||1, :per_page => 15)   # load all matching records
  end
end

And presto I have an index that
a) default to sorting by name (see the first line of the index method)
b) let's me sort on an associated value

Cool!

I'm sorry, but POW sucks

I have been (trying to) use Pow, and the Powder gem, for a few weeks now. At the outset it looked good: you get a local domain for you test on, you don't have to worry about deployments, etc etc.
But it sucks.
If you get an error in rendering (and we are using this in development, so of course this is going to happen) pow goes into a tail spin and on my MacPro it takes almost a minute to come out of it as it retries the request dozens of times.

So you end up with a huge log that looks pretty much like this:

  SQL (2.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (0.9ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (0.9ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.0ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.3ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (0.9ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (0.9ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.4ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.2ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.4ms)  SHOW TABLES
  SQL (1.1ms)  SHOW TABLES
Rendered /Users/smyp/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03@toygaroo_r3/gems/actionpack-3.0.3/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/_request_and_response.erb (8663.2ms)
Rendered /Users/smyp/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03@toygaroo_r3/gems/actionpack-3.0.3/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/_request_and_response.erb (8728.0ms)
Rendered /Users/smyp/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03@toygaroo_r3/gems/actionpack-3.0.3/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/template_error.erb within rescues/layout (22759.6ms)
Rendered /Users/smyp/.rvm/gems/ree-1.8.7-2011.03@toygaroo_r3/gems/actionpack-3.0.3/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/template_error.erb within rescues/layout (22758.7ms

I am going back to using Passenger standalone. Ok, you loose the pretty local domain, but it works much more reliably.

nginx, rails and ubuntu - 502 bad gateway

We were getting tons of 502 errors under load, but then I stumbled across a posting in a news group.

cat /proc/sys/net/core/somaxconn

Will show you how many connections you can have. This should be 1024, because Phusion Passenger is hard coded for this value. Mine was 128!

Do this:

sudo sysctl -w net.core.somaxconn=1024

And then restart nginx.