Latest Screencasts

Emanuele Tozzato gives a brief introduction to Redis, then demonstrates real-life database performance optimization with redis-object and how to manage background jobs using Resque. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.

This is the first of three screencasts where we begin to look at a few new Rails libraries to help you scale your Rails applications. In this first episode we take a look at Bullet, which will help you optimize your SQL queries by giving you growl notifications when you’re not using eager loading properly or should be using a counter cache. Then there’s Rails Indexes which provides Rake tasks to find missing indexes in your database. Finally the last library we’ll learn about is Scrooge, a SQL query optimizer which can reduce the amount of data getting sent from your database to your Rails application.

Over time a CSS file can become large and filled with unused selectors. In this episode I show how to use the Deadweight gem to determine which CSS selects you can remove.

Use JavaScript to allow dynamic content in a page cache. In this episode I show you how to insert the user-specific content into a page through JavaScript.

Metric Fu is a compilation of several tools to help find areas of code that could be improved. In this episode I show you how to setup this tool on the railscasts.com source code.

Nick Zadrozny takes us on a tour of basic website performance optimization, covering 13 optimizations you shouldn't deploy your site without. He'll also go over some sample implementations for a typical Rails app, including a demo of how to serve your public assets from Amazon's new CloudFront CDN.

In order to improve performance of your Rails application you need to find the bottlenecks. A great starting point is your production log. In this episode you will see how to use RAWK to analyze your log file and determine which controller actions take up the most processing time.