Speeding up Rails tests with Spring
I found Rails tests were running slow, these things helped. Instrumenting application.rb First, I added some logging to application.rb ruby < view plain text > def logg(m) puts "#{DateTime.now}...
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How to use different favicons for development, staging, and production
It’s useful to have different favicons for each environment during development, as Pamela recently pointed out. Here’s how I do it. First, generate the images. Most graphics editor have some kind of...
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Load-balancing Rails with Nginx
Well this was some fine undocumented black magic. I’ve got Player FM behind a load balancer now, using the following Nginx config. I’ll explain some more about the overall upgrade later. # App load...
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Logging an error with Exceptional
Here’s a quick utility for people using Exceptional to track errors. It lets you force an exception to be logged and without having to rescue it. Example: exceptional “read_file”, “file not found” The...
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Defer and Recur with Rails, Redis, and Resque
I’ve put off some scaling related issues about as long as possible, and am now proceeding to introduce a deferred-job stack. I’ll explain what I’ve learned so far, and with the caveat: this isn’t in...
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Testing HTTPS Locally
As I’m migrating the player over to HTTPS, one challenge is partial content, leading to an incomplete padlock and strikethrough domain warning like this: And the harsh but fair warning, upon...
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Monkey-patching a sample() method in Rails
It’s useful while debugging to choose a random sample. Thus you can include something like this in application.rb or an initializer. Now you can say Post.sample to get a single post or Post.sample(5)...
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Private resources with ElasticSearch and Tire
I’m adding private channels to Player FM and one consideration is search results. Tire’s activerecord does a great job at making updates transparent, but in this case some manual overriding is...
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Rails Cache Sweeper Gotchas
As you’ll see here, Rails cache sweepers are a tricky subject. Here are some general things I’ve learned. Sweepers are dual creatures. “Here’s the scoop: sweepers observe both your models and your...
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Firefighting an RSS Aggregator’s Performance
That’s a before-and-after shot of the database server’s CPU! I was watching it slowly creep up, planning to inspect it after some other work, before receiving mails from Linode that the virtual server...
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Sorting a Rails log file by SQL duration
Rails’ ActiveRecord logger writes log files like: Post Load (735.8ms) SELECT posts.* FROM posts where post.title = 'foo' You may want to know the longest SQL queries for performance optimsation...
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The Weirdness of Ajax Redirects: Some Workarounds
I've been dealing with the situation when your server redirects after a DELETE. Which is actually a fairly common use case. User deletes a blog post, redirect them to the index of all posts. The...
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Rails Default Date Gotcha
This had me going for a while! I wanted to default a field to the epoch, i.e. some decades ago, or older. That's because a batch process will work on the records with the oldest such field, so setting...
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Preventing a Rails (Mongrel App) from Crashing
I've had a Rails website which works fine for about 12-18 hours, then starts giving out intermittent 500 errors because the mongrels die. After searching around, I ended up fixing it on two levels....
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Rails JSON, JSON Rails
< p style="clear:both; margin-top: 2em; "> Man, JSON has come out of nowhere! I first came across it amid the Javascript hype in early '05, now it's everywhere. Not only in your Ajax apps, but...
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Ruby/Rails: Overriding NilClass
Rails uses "whiny nil", which means if you call a method on an object that happens to be nil (null), you get an exception. This is good. But with strings in a web app (in any language), you often don't...
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If HTML Used Convention Over Configuration …
Browsers would automatically pull in CSS and JS according to the filename and I would no longer have to look for an example every time I need a link or script tag. In the absence of any other spec,...
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Ruby is Rails is … REST
Will the peripheral IT community come to view REST and Rails as equivalent? It might sound ridiculous, but consider: Unix==Linux, Wiki==Wikipedia, Ajax=Web 2.0, blogging==RSS, podcast==spoken MP3. Last...
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