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Building a feature is not good enough anymore: all your work won't be of use if it's not performant enough. So how to improve performance? After all, performance is not an easy discipline to master: all slow applications are slow in their own way, meaning that there is no silver bullet for these kinds of problems. In this presentation, we will guide you across patterns, strategies, and little tricks to improve performance. We will do that by sharing real stories of our daily experience facing and solving real performance issues in an application that daily serves billions of requests per day.
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In the presentation titled 'A Rails performance guidebook: from 0 to 1B requests/day' by Cristian Planas and Anatoly Mikhaylov at the Helvetic Ruby 2023 event, the speakers address the crucial question of whether Ruby on Rails can scale effectively for high-traffic applications. They begin by debunking the myth that Rails cannot scale, highlighting that many successful companies, including Shopify and Zendesk, rely on Rails to manage billions of requests daily. Key points discussed include: - **Reality of Scaling with Rails**: While there is a perception that Rails doesn’t scale, many organizations successfully utilize it at scale. - **Journey through Time**: Cristian shares his personal experiences in scaling applications and the challenges he faced, including his transition from novice to tech lead. - **Data Volume Challenges**: Zendesk processes an overwhelming amount of data with over 20 billion support tickets and significant dataset growth, necessitating effective performance monitoring and error budgeting. - **Performance Monitoring**: The importance of monitoring is emphasized as a means to identify performance issues, combined with techniques like sampling to manage cost. - **Database Performance**: Anatoly discusses the growing challenges with database management at Zendesk, stressing that application performance issues often stem from underlying database problems. They developed a three-step approach for right-sizing databases and optimizing costs. - **Caching Strategies**: Effective use of caching techniques, such as write-through caching, is presented as a method to drastically reduce latency in critical application parts. - **Doron Paradox**: The talk introduces an allegory using 'Doron the Cat' to illustrate the challenges of technology misuse and the need for understanding the tools and technology effectively. - **Cold Storage**: The benefits of cold storage for data archiving are explored to maintain manageable data sizes while ensuring historical data access when necessary. - **Establishing Product Limits**: Setting reasonable limits on product usage to prevent excessive resource consumption is highlighted as a key scalability strategy. - **User Experience**: Improving performance considerations should also incorporate user experience, particularly with UI interactions. The conclusion emphasizes an acceptance of trade-offs in performance engineering, advocating for embracing imperfection while optimizing for developer happiness, which ultimately leads to more productive systems. The sentiment captured reflects that successful scaling is about strategic choices and understanding the limits of technology rather than a pursuit of an elusive perfect solution.
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