Scaling a Rails Application

While I created the Edufire Dev blog about a week ago I wasn’t quite sure what to post here.  Happily my founder, Jon Bischke, pointed out that a good startup friend* of ours is having some scaling issues with their Ruby application.  Jon mentioned this to us and since we don’t really have any time we can use to help them out, I thought perhaps our blogging some information on what we’ve done to scale our Rails application might be helpful.

I won’t profess that any of these points are particularly insightful per se.  What we’ve been doing, over the past few months, is looking for any place where we can improve our performance / capacity making us scale better.  So while I won’t say that any one of these is a magic bullet, I think collectively they certainly qualify.  Here are a few of the topics we’ll be covering:

• Moving to minimagick from rmagick
• Pulling actionmailer off of form submits
• Asynchronous whenever Possible 
• Indices, Indices, Indices
• Using assert_efficient_sql

We’ll also talk about some of the basics of systems administration for your Rails app.  Some of the topics there include:

• Using backup_fu to backup your database to Amazon S3
• Using Pingdom for monitoring your site’s uptime

Tags: scalability