Latest Screencasts

The :include and :joins options for the find method can be a little confusing because they are so similar. In this episode I show specifically when to use which option. Watch this screencast

Installing and configuring Spork to make RSpec and Cucumber load specs and features faster. Watch this screencast

Rails 2.3.3 brings us a new feature called "touch". See how to use this to auto-expire associated caches in this episode. Watch this screencast

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. Watch this screencast

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. Watch this screencast

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. Watch this screencast

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. Watch this screencast

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. Watch this screencast

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. Watch this screencast

Ever want to know what Rails is doing under the hood during a request? In this episode I show three different profiling tools: New Relic RPM, FiveRuns TuneUp, and Rack::Bug. Watch this screencast