The speed of Rails

[Josh Gilman]

Hello guys.

Recently I have been developing a website using Rails. I come from a PHP
background, a very experienced one to say the least, and have been
developing for quite some time now. In PHP I have a framework quite like
Rails, although at the time of writing it I had no clue Rails even
existed. It shares the same basic concept of routing and a strong
database back-end. Here is a comparison of two sites I have developed,
the second one (Rails one) still under construction:

http://countermail.com/index.php?mod=core - PHP
http://www.joshgilman.com/articles/index - Rails

I use standard 4MB/s cable connection via a wireless router and the PHP
website takes about 1-2 seconds to load whereas the Rails website takes
a good 6-7 seconds to load. This speed is really killing me, and I'm not
sure it's entirely Rails fault but rather part of my host's fault. My
question is what's a good host to have a Rails application on? Is this
the normal speed I should expect from a rails application? I would love
to continue with this application but with speeds like this I am already
considering switching over to PHP.

If anyone can make some suggestions to help me out here I would be very
greatful. Thank you.

Cheers,
Josh

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

[ChrisR]

I had a similar problem when I cut across to Ruby. I hadn't realized
about preloading an application with webrick or mongrel.

On Jan 31, 1:41 pm, Josh Gilman <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net>
wrote:

> Hello guys.
>
> Recently I have been developing a website using Rails. I come from a PHP
> background, a very experienced one to say the least, and have been
> developing for quite some time now. In PHP I have a framework quite like
> Rails, although at the time of writing it I had no clue Rails even
> existed. It shares the same basic concept of routing and a strong
> database back-end. Here is a comparison of two sites I have developed,
> the second one (Rails one) still under construction:
>

> http://countermail.com/index.php?mod=core- PHPhttp://www.joshgilman.com/articles/index- Rails

[bra...@gmail.com]

On 1/30/07, Josh Gilman <rails-mai...@andreas-s.net> wrote:
> http://countermail.com/index.php?mod=core - PHP
> http://www.joshgilman.com/articles/index - Rails
>
> I use standard 4MB/s cable connection via a wireless router and the PHP
> website takes about 1-2 seconds to load whereas the Rails website takes
> a good 6-7 seconds to load. This speed is really killing me, and I'm not
> sure it's entirely Rails fault but rather part of my host's fault. My
> question is what's a good host to have a Rails application on? Is this
> the normal speed I should expect from a rails application? I would love
> to continue with this application but with speeds like this I am already
> considering switching over to PHP.

Some standard questions:

Are you running production or development mode?
How is the app deployed (Webrick, Mongrel, FastCGI, CGI)?

[Josh Gilman]

I'm running in development and I believe it's deployed in FastCGI, but
I'm not sure, my host does not explicitely say.

[Carl Johnson]

> I'm running in development and I believe it's deployed in FastCGI, but
> I'm not sure, my host does not explicitely say.

So you realize that development is exponentially slower than production
mode? For one thing, all files are re-loaded at every single request
(handy in dev mode so you don't have to restart anything, but _slow_).
There's no caching. There's a lot more logging which slows things down.
And other, slower differences I'm sure I'm forgetting.

[Alex Wayne]

Josh Gilman wrote:
> unknown wrote:
>> On 1/30/07, Josh Gilman <rails-mai...@andreas-s.net> wrote:
>>> considering switching over to PHP.
>> Some standard questions:
>>
>> Are you running production or development mode?
>> How is the app deployed (Webrick, Mongrel, FastCGI, CGI)?
>
> I'm running in development and I believe it's deployed in FastCGI, but
> I'm not sure, my host does not explicitely say.

Switch to production mode and you should see a very large improvement.
In development all your models and controllers are reloaded on each
request, and in production the are read on bootup of the server and then
no more.

You should expect slowness in development mode due the large number of
files in a rails aplication. But in production the speed should be
comparable to PHP.

[Josh Gilman]

How can you ensure it's in production? I changed config/environment.rb
and uncommented:

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'

I notice a little bit of difference, still a little slow though for only
loading a few articles. Right now I am running off of NetFirms which is
pretty crappy, can someone make any suggestions for a host geared
towards Rails applications? That's not overly priced, I am very limited
on money right now.

[Alex Wayne]

Josh Gilman wrote:
> can someone make any suggestions for a host geared
> towards Rails applications? That's not overly priced, I am very limited
> on money right now.

http://railsmachine.com/
http://textdrive.com

[s.ross]

Try RailsPlayground. You will need to know more about your deployment before
you can really figure out whether you have a performance problem.

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[Josh Gilman]

Alex Wayne wrote:
> Josh Gilman wrote:
>> can someone make any suggestions for a host geared
>> towards Rails applications? That's not overly priced, I am very limited
>> on money right now.
>
> http://railsmachine.com/
> http://textdrive.com

railsmachine is too expensive and I heard textdrive sucked beyond
belief. I have been doing my own research and it doesn't seem like there
is any real good ones out there that are not for enterprise applications
and charge you enterprise prices.

[Josh Gilman]

Now here's my question. They offer two plans, one for $60 a month but no
support for lighttpd/mongrel servers and then one for $108 a month with
support for lighttpd/mongrel servers. Is it worth it to go all the way
to $108 for the servers for pay $60 and go with fastcgi?

[Bill Walton]

Take a look at a2hosting.com. I've been using them for about 6 months now
for a dev environment at < $10/month . Excellent support. Very good for
the $, IMO.

hth,
Bill

[s.ross]

You haven't really specified what you are deploying, how much traffic you
expect and so on. Planet Argon offers a very nice shared hosting environment
at reasonable rates, but don't expect to run Amazon-like traffic through it.
RailsMachine and EngineYard have what appear to be great plans for
larger-scale apps or ones where you need guaranteed cycles. I've read that
they're worth what they charge.

The real question is this: Are you a dev who's test-driving rails to see how
it works ($5 developer plan) or are you pushing something live tomorrow that
has to serve hundreds of thousands of pages a day without breaking a sweat?

Rails hosting is not as commoditized as PHP and Perl (or any Windows)
hosting are. Deploying a Rails app requires more from your host and more
from you. If you are in development mode, it might be worth your while to
get a bit of dev space on one of the less expensive hosts to try different
deployments.

Hope this helps.

--
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[Nick Snels]

For a rundown of a few Rails hosting companies check out
http://www.railshostinginfo.com . There you can compare and review
several companies and you can also narrow your search by price.

Kind regards,

Nick

[Marston A.]

If you can, splurge for a VPS at www.slicehost.com . Instead of
getting a $10/month shared hosting account, skip a few latte's and get
a 256MB slice for $20/month, can't beat it.

On Jan 31, 5:54 am, Josh Gilman <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net>
wrote:

> Alex Wayne wrote:
> > Josh Gilman wrote:
> >> unknown wrote:

[jpease]

Since you had your app in 'development' mode, maybe a good question is
whether you are actually wanting to deploy this app or are still
'developing' it, or even just playing with Rails to learn. Unless you
are actually ready to publicly deploy - perhaps it would be cheapest,
fastest and best to simply 'host' it on your local machine.

I personally have had good experiences with ServInt for VPS hosting,
their plans start a little under $50 for a fully-managed server. Set
it up with LiteSpeed's free server which has built in support for RoR
and you have a fairly easy to setup, easy to maintain server
configuration that still gives you cPanel if you should need such a
thing.

--

JP

On Jan 31, 12:04 am, Josh Gilman <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net>
wrote:

> railsmachine is too expensive and I heard textdrive sucked beyond

[Josh Gilman]

I am still kind of "playing" around with Rails, although I have plans of
deploying the current website I am creating once I finish it. I don't
expect too much trafic, but I mean there are going to be a lot of people
searching through hundreds of articles and I don't want it taking 10-15
seconds every search. It's not really traffic I am worried about, just
the speed of the things the site is doing. This will me my first rails
application deployed.

[Rick Olson]

Even development mode shouldn't be that slow, unless you just have a
lot of queries on that page. If so, running on mongrel/fastcgi in
production won't help much.

--
Rick Olson
http://weblog.techno-weenie.net
http://mephistoblog.com

[sign...@gmail.com]

On Jan 30, 8:56 pm, Alex Wayne <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net>
wrote:

I would suggest http://www.railshosting.org/#free_rails_hosting to get
a decent free account while you are testing the waters

[Josh Gilman]

What I am really looking for is a host to use once I have the
application finished, I can run and test the application on my computer,
so that's not a problem. I need a reliable host that I don't need to
worry about switching from whenever I do start getting bigger traffic.

[Isak Hansen]

I'm with Rick here; there's probably a better way to do whatever it is
you're trying to do.

Is the site this slow during development as well? All of it, or just a
single action?

Isak

[Josh Gilman]

On my computer running on a Webrick server it's lightning fast. There is
no lag and it runs perfectly fine. I'm am not sending many queries. The
most cluttered page would probably be the display article page where I
query for the article information and then query for all the comments
that belong to that article, but those are the only 2 queries that I am
sending. I don't understand why that would be so laggy, my basic code
looks like:

@article = Article.find(params[:id])
# Display article information #
render(:partial, :article_comments, @article.comment)
# Display the comments

Note the above was written by hand so I'm sure it contains mistakes but
you get the general idea.

[David Harkness]

I'm sure you've thought of it, but the only time I've had a slow system
(without heavy traffic), is improper use of the joins, or not using
eager loading.

For Example,

Myobject.find(:all,:include=>'childtable')

One of the big things, is that rails makes it easy to do something this

<%=Myobject.childtable.full_name-%>
Doing that 500 times in a view, will make 500 database calls unles you
use eager loading.

[Stephan Wehner]

>
> What I am really looking for is a host to use once I have the
> application finished, I can run and test the application on my computer,
> so that's not a problem. I need a reliable host that I don't need to
> worry about switching from whenever I do start getting bigger traffic.

You could try dreamhost.com - with a coupon you might just spend $10 for
the first year. Search google from dreamhost coupon. There is a
dreamhost wiki with Rails deployment tips.

Stephan

[Josh Gilman]

What does:

Myobject.childtable.each {}

Do? I thought it would just query the database once, grab all the
results, and loop through them.

[Philip Hallstrom]

>> I'm sure you've thought of it, but the only time I've had a slow system
>> (without heavy traffic), is improper use of the joins, or not using
>> eager loading.
>>
>>
>> For Example,
>>
>> Myobject.find(:all,:include=>'childtable')
>>
>> One of the big things, is that rails makes it easy to do something this
>>
>> <%=Myobject.childtable.full_name-%>
>> Doing that 500 times in a view, will make 500 database calls unles you
>> use eager loading.
>
> What does:
>
> Myobject.childtable.each {}
>
> Do? I thought it would just query the database once, grab all the
> results, and loop through them.

Right, but that's not exactly what the parent meant. Consider...

model... Person has_one Address

controller.... @people = Person.find(:all)

view....

<% @people.each do |person| %>
<%= person.name %> lives in <%= person.address.city %>
<% end %>

If you've got 500 people, you're going ot have 501 database queries. One
to get all the people, and one to get each person's address.

Change the controller to... @people = Person.find(:all,
:include => [:address])

And now Rails does a join query so you only have one database query.

-philip

[s.ross]

I keep thinking it has to be simpler than an unoptimized database query. The
OP described his application and it seemed like a fairly straightforward
posts/comments kind of thing. The most glaring thing that can bring a Rails
app to its knees is deploying as CGI and not FCGI. Could this be it?

Ok, let's presume it was deployed as FCGI or Mongrel. What do the logs look
like for a slow page? That would at least provide a hint about whether the
database was the bottleneck.

Finally, how about creating a dirt-simple action:

def dirt_simple
@post = Post.find :first
end

and a dirt simple view
<%= @post[:id] %>

How fast is that? If it's not fast, then you can take your focus off the
database and point it back to your server config.

Here's the deal. It's fast on the local machine under WEBrick. Ok, that's
understandable -- long-running process, no network overhead, but wait! The
database on the local machine should be *slower*. So, as I continue attempt
inference from this thread, it tells me that the performance problem is in
the server on the remote host or the host itself.

My first guess was that the deployment was straight CGI and that's what was
causing the holdup. If I'm not right, it'll show up in the logs.

--steve

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[Josh Gilman]

>> And now Rails does a join query so you only have one database query.
>>
>> -philip
>>
>> >
>>
>>
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://www.nabble.com/-Rails--The-speed-of-Rails-tf3145992.html#a8742978
> Sent from the RubyOnRails Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

I share the same feelings, I'm thinking it's NetFirms being cheap and
running it on CGI, hence why I was asking for a better host. Sample logs
look like:

Processing ArticlesController#show (for **.**.***.*** at 2007-01-31
21:57:03) [GET]
Parameters: {"action"=>"show", "id"=>"1", "controller"=>"articles"}
Rendering within layouts/articles
Rendering articles/show
Completed in 0.18064 (5 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.02450 (13%) | DB:
0.11660 (64%) | 200 OK [http://www.joshgilman.com/articles/show/1]

I blocked my IP out of course.

[Scott Mathieson]

[railsplayground.com]

> Now here's my question. They offer two plans, one for $60 a month but no
> support for lighttpd/mongrel servers and then one for $108 a month with
> support for lighttpd/mongrel servers. Is it worth it to go all the way
> to $108 for the servers for pay $60 and go with fastcgi?

Those prices are actually per _year_... apologies if that's already clear.
So, $9 per month gets you two mongrel instances (the least you really
need but also more than enough to get going), and you can add more
instances for under $4 a month each.

I'm not affiliated, though I have been a customer for over a year.

[s.ross]

That's odd. It is in your database access. I don't suppose you'd like to put
a pastie up of the code for the action, eh?

Petr Janda-2 wrote:
>
>
> I share the same feelings, I'm thinking it's NetFirms being cheap and
> running it on CGI, hence why I was asking for a better host. Sample logs
> look like:
>
>
> Processing ArticlesController#show (for **.**.***.*** at 2007-01-31
> 21:57:03) [GET]
> Parameters: {"action"=>"show", "id"=>"1", "controller"=>"articles"}
> Rendering within layouts/articles
> Rendering articles/show
> Completed in 0.18064 (5 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.02450 (13%) | DB:
> 0.11660 (64%) | 200 OK [http://www.joshgilman.com/articles/show/1]
>
>
> I blocked my IP out of course.
>
> --
>

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[Stephan Wehner]

Steve Ross wrote:
> That's odd. It is in your database access. I don't suppose you'd like to
> put
> a pastie up of the code for the action, eh?
>

How do you see its in the database ? 5 requests per second should not be
noticable, if there is only one per hour.

I timed access to the page from my machine at 3.5 seconds compared to
yahoo.com at 0.5 seconds. So something is likely to be wrong.

Could the OP determine just how the Rails machinery is invoked?

Stephan

[aniba...@gmail.com]

I would recommend also to subscribe to the new group:

http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-deployment?hl=en

We are using shared and cheap hosting from RailsPlayground, for some
of our proyects and it works great, the best part is the support.

--
Aníbal Rojas
http://www.rubycorner.com
http://www.hasmanydevelopers.com

On Jan 30, 8:41 pm, Josh Gilman <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net>
wrote:
> Hello guys.
>
> Recently I have been developing a website using Rails. I come from a PHP
> background, a very experienced one to say the least, and have been
> developing for quite some time now. In PHP I have a framework quite like
> Rails, although at the time of writing it I had no clue Rails even
> existed. It shares the same basic concept of routing and a strong
> database back-end. Here is a comparison of two sites I have developed,
> the second one (Rails one) still under construction:
>
> http://countermail.com/index.php?mod=core- PHPhttp://www.joshgilman.com/articles/index- Rails
>
> I use standard 4MB/s cable connection via a wireless router and the PHP
> website takes about 1-2 seconds to load whereas the Rails website takes
> a good 6-7 seconds to load. This speed is really killing me, and I'm not
> sure it's entirely Rails fault but rather part of my host's fault. My
> question is what's a good host to have a Rails application on? Is this
> the normal speed I should expect from a rails application? I would love
> to continue with this application but with speeds like this I am already

> considering switching over to PHP.
>

> If anyone can make some suggestions to help me out here I would be very
> greatful. Thank you.
>
> Cheers,
> Josh
>
> --
> Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

[s.ross]

I think it's in the database because of this in the log:

Completed in 0.18064 (5 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.02450 (13%) | DB:
0.11660 (64%) | 200 OK

Notice that DB is 64% of the time.

Still, you're right, 5 req/sec should not be a big deal.

I'd still like to know if it was deployed as a CGI because that's then only
time I've ever seen such gummy behavior.

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