Latest Screencasts (page 23)

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.

This is a follow up to my first Rack screencast, Rack Basics. In this screencast, we cover a bit more of the basics. Instead of playing around in an IRB shell, we create an executable Rack application using a Rackup file (the conventional way to run Rack applications). We use...

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.

If you’re a Ruby programmer and you’ve never directly used Rack before then this screencast is for you. This introduces you to the very basics of Rack. If you’ve used Rack before and / or you’ve very comfortable with the basics, watch for some additional Rack screencasts coming from me....

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.

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.

Does your web application have an ActiveResource-based API, or are you thinking of creating one? Testing your API’s client library can be a pain - it has to hit a real, running version of your application. ActiveResource gives us a way to mock its HTTP calls, via HttpMock but it’s...

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.