Latest Screencasts (page 2)

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you can’t fully page cache your Rails action, when your next best choice is using Action Caching.  Action Caching allows you to run filters such as authorization on each request before they’re able to see the cached content of the page.

If there’s no way to cache the entire content of a page, then odds are you can probably cache smaller pieces of it.  This is where fragment caching comes in, allowing you to cache common parts of a webpage which are resource intensive and may be used accross mulitple pages.

Page caching is pretty simple to do, but what happens when you need pagination or dynamic data on your pages? Can you still use page caching? In this screencast we’ll start out showing how to solve these problems and finish up with my first rant of the series "Login status is overrated."

Welcome to the Scaling Rails Screencast Series produced by Gregg Pollack and supported by New Relic.

Before we can talk about Server-side performance, we need to go over Client-side performance.  We’re talking about how fast your website comes up in a user’s browser.

Ruby on Rails comes with several caching mechanisms out of the box, starting with Page Caching. In this episode we show how to implement Page Caching in a simple blog application.