Latest Screencasts

If the bottleneck of your application is your database even after caching as much as possible, what can you do? This is the first of two screencasts where we’re going to learn about techniques for increasing the power of your Database. In this first video we learn how to grow our database step by step using both vertical and horizontal scaling.

One way to measure the scalability of your Rails application is to use Load Testing. This is the first of two screencasts where we attempt to give an introduction to load testing and show how to use two of the most basic Load Testing tools, Apache Bench and httperf.

This is the second of two episodes where we learn the basics of Load Testing our web applications. In this episode we take a look at autobench, a tool that automates our httperf load tests, then we’ll figure out how to visualize our httperf results in a graph, and finally take a brief look at a few other Load Testing tools you might want to get familiar with.

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.

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.