RailsConf 2011: Aaron Patterson, "Double Dream Hands: So Intense!"

What people said

maercsrats · 2011-07 · Recommendation

There is a talk by Aaron Patterson from RailsConf talking about why rails 3.1 is slower than rails 3 and rails 2.3. Basically the rack pipeline is getting deeper. Because rack is so simplistic every request requires you going through that pipeline and back again. His solution is to break up the pipeline into 3 separate types: generators, filters (for response data), and lifecycle hooks. Doing this brought the speed back up to rails 2.3 speeds and a bit faster in some instances. But those were early numbers. You can see his talk here: [VIDEO] The interesting stuff happens around the 20 min. mark. Overall, there are a lot of people who want to make ruby better and faster. Rubinius, Jruby and MacRuby are all examples. There are also people who want to make Rails faster. They are examining the slower parts (active record, rack, etc) and working to make it better.

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jonsmock · 2012-06 · Reference

Nice article, Jose! For those interested, Aaron Patterson (tenderlove) talks about this in his RailsConf talk, starting at 26:45. [VIDEO]

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getsat · 2011-12 · Reference

As the number of Rack middleware pieces in a base Rails app grows, it gets slower. MRI and YARV spend a lot more time doing GC as the stack depth grows. Aaron Patterson mentioned that he was working on a modification to the Rack API where each piece of middleware did not call the next piece, reducing the stack depth and drastically improving the runtime performance of Rails apps. Here's the video where he talks about it (towards the beginning): [VIDEO]

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