Your story closely resembles the challenges we had scaling sommelierwine.ca before a media event at our latest launch location. I knew that our site would receive an increase in traffic, and the increase would only be temporary.
As a rails site hosted on Heroku, this gave us the ability to scale our site using the gambit of widgets that Heroku offers; but, we didn’t want to spend the money and cheat ourselves from the satisfaction of scaling our site.
Using New Relic (a gem available on Heroku) I identified our first performance bottleneck - database queries. Certain queries were taking over 30 seconds to complete! These database queries all involved a table of BLOBs (on the order of 20MB) that needed to be searched and sorted. I tried adding indexes but that only marginally reduced the query time. The solution we found included moving the BLOBs to their own table while keeping an index to them in a table of their attributes [1]. Doing this, we were able to reduce query times down to less than a 100ms.
The remaining bottlenecks we found using YSlow has helped us reduce the overhead in loading pages substantially.
Even though we were able to weather the storm of visitors to our site, we did leave some tasks for the next one including implementing caching, background processing, and remote file storage. All in time.
Does anyone have other wallet-friendly Rails/Heroku scaling stories share?
[1] This is database 101 stuff - a class I never took.
As a rails site hosted on Heroku, this gave us the ability to scale our site using the gambit of widgets that Heroku offers; but, we didn’t want to spend the money and cheat ourselves from the satisfaction of scaling our site.
Using New Relic (a gem available on Heroku) I identified our first performance bottleneck - database queries. Certain queries were taking over 30 seconds to complete! These database queries all involved a table of BLOBs (on the order of 20MB) that needed to be searched and sorted. I tried adding indexes but that only marginally reduced the query time. The solution we found included moving the BLOBs to their own table while keeping an index to them in a table of their attributes [1]. Doing this, we were able to reduce query times down to less than a 100ms.
The remaining bottlenecks we found using YSlow has helped us reduce the overhead in loading pages substantially.
Even though we were able to weather the storm of visitors to our site, we did leave some tasks for the next one including implementing caching, background processing, and remote file storage. All in time.
Does anyone have other wallet-friendly Rails/Heroku scaling stories share?
[1] This is database 101 stuff - a class I never took.