Screencasts

Most of the big Web 2.0 websites rely on memcached (pronounced "Memcache-Dee") to scale, even the ones not using Rails. In this screencast you’ll learn how easy it is to use memcached in your Rails application, and how to do low level query caching for websites where you have highly customized layouts. Watch this screencast

Taylor Weibley is the director of support at Engine Yard, where he’s seen plenty of poorly scaling Rails applications.  In this first interview he lets us know about three things we can do today to help our application performance.  After his interview I go through some common ways to Scale your Database layer. Watch this screencast

Once you’ve done all the server side caching you can possibly do, you might want to take a look back at the client side of things to do some advanced client-side caching.  In this episode we’ll show how to effectively use the max-age, etag, and last_modified helpers to scale your application. Watch this screencast

Once you have a firm grasp of the 3 header tags we talked about in the previous episode (max-age, etags, and last_modified) you can start to take advantage of reverse proxy caches. In this episode we let you know exactly what a proxy cache is, and how you might use it to effectively scale a dynamic website to millions of users. Watch this screencast

Jesse Newland works at Rails Machine, where he’s helped scale many Rails applications. In this episode we ask him for 3 tips to help us Scale our applications. We’re then going to take a closer look at one of his recommendations: how to properly deploy a Rails app. Watch this screencast

Jim Gochee is the VP of Engineering at New Relic, where he’s helped shape RPM, their server monitoring tool. After asking him his recommendations for Scaling Rails, we take a closer look at some of the advanced features of New Relic’s RPM tool. If you haven’t seen some of the upper tier performance monitoring features of RPM, prepared to be impressed. Watch this screencast

Rails 2.3 shipped with Rack support and contains a set of middleware libraries which can be used to customize and optimize your Rails application. In this screencast we go over the basics of Rack & Rack Middleware, walk through the Rails Rack stack, and show how to optimize certain actions in your Rails application using Metal. Watch this screencast

Rails 2.3 brings us much of the same functionality as the Rails Engines plugin. Learn how to embed one application into another in this episode. Watch this screencast

Rails Metal is a way to bypass the standard Rails request process for a performance boost. In this episode you will learn how to shave off a few milliseconds using Metal. Watch this screencast

Rack middleware is a way to filter a request and response coming into your application. In this episode I show how to modify the response body using middleware. Watch this screencast