Life is grand

Three talks in and it is going fairly well. Soren Burkhart talk was billed as how they used Rails to revolutionise the airline industry. Untortunatley he spent too much time on the preliminaries and had to rush through the meat of his talk (the app and its development.) It looked interesting but we didn’t get into much detail. Might be worth contacting him directly to get some info.

James Cox’s talk on Rails performance and scaling (pdf) was pretty good. A chunk of my notes from it:

- columns => :select, pagination => :limit, :offset)
- @var ||= query
- MySQL is decent
- Memcache (doesn’t have to be on the same machine)
- mysql \s
- mysql - log slow queries - mysql_slow_queries
- nginx (russian but fast)
- mongrel for scaling even if it isn’t the fastest
- hostname lookup in apache2 bad

Matt Kent and Kyle Shank gave a demo of his RadRails IDE which seems to have come a long way from what I initially used. Auto-completion they want to do but apparently is a difficult feature.They are also working on porting TextMate Ruby snippets to RadRails. Certainly more featurefull than RIDE-ME at this stage. Autotest is a nifty way to run certain (or all) tests in the background on an interval or on save.

So far every talker has been young and inexperienced. Really smart but these aren’t slick conference speakers like you get at Java and Microsoft events. This is a good and bad thing. Good as you get low level info, bad because they can wander and be unprepared for the talk.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 2:33 pm and is filed under 2006, AAA, Conference, Event, James Cox, Matt Kent, Rails, Ruby on Rails, airlines, memchace, mysql, performance, radrails, railsconf, railsconf europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.