Archive for the ‘Rails’ Category

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RailsConf Europe 2006: Rails in the system

Thursday, September 14th, 2006

And into Jason Hoffman’s talk on systems administration and Rails. Deployment, hosting, power, databases etc.

Strongspace, a Rails app from Joyent, is at 60terabytes. Joyent does TextDrive remember so they know some things. BTW Jason is from Joyent.

Rails is just a small part of your entire system. You need a lot more than just a sorted Rails config to have a well served app.

Virtualisation is the real only way. Xen, VMWare (if you must) or Solaris Zones.

Jason is not enamoured with Linux; “If I could turn Linux into a clever way of saying ‘crashes everyday and doesn’t tell you why’, I would.”

WordPress, half a million users, uses DNS load balancing. Works pretty well.

Joyent chooses:
- Console is Lantronix
- Sun Fire AMD servers, T1000, X4100 etc.
- Opteron 285 and TI SPARC
- 2GB RAM
- Sen Fire X5400 storage
- 500GB SATA discs
- Solaris Nevada OS
- Gigabit with cat6 cables

DTrace is getting Ruby integration so you can write performance tests to find out what exactly is going wrong. DTrace is from Solaris and also ported to Mac OS X in Leopard via XRay in XCode.

Key concepts:
- virtualise
- seperate hardware comp. (db from procesing from storage)
- KISS
- stoichiometry (from chemistry, the practice of adding up. If you can’t just add on another server then you have problems.)
- config management and distributed control
- pool and split i.e. SOA
- Understand what is maximum to understand what should be happening vs. what is (potential)

I’ve asked Jason for the slides to this talk and will post them later.

Excellent talk from Jason.
- DNS and federation

Posted in 2006, AAA, Conference, Event, Rails, Ruby on Rails, database, railsconf, railsconf europe, system Jason A. Hoffman | Comments

RailsConf Europe 2006: Performance, RadRails and airlines

Thursday, September 14th, 2006

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.

Posted in 2006, AAA, Conference, Event, James Cox, Matt Kent, Rails, Ruby on Rails, airlines, memchace, mysql, performance, radrails, railsconf, railsconf europe | Comments

RailsConf Europe 2006: Start up

Thursday, September 14th, 2006

At RailsConf Europe 2006. Good turn out and location.

David’s keynote was very technical. He mentioned a revamping of the views (codenamed simply helpful, currently a plugin) and how ActiveResource probably won’t be in Rails 2.0.

Kathy Sierra’s talk was really good. All about passion and emotion in our products. Talk to the brain, not the mind i.e. go for the caveman in all of us rather than our abstracted logical sides. To a degree of course.

Posted in 2006, AAA, Conference, David Heinemeier Hansson, Event, Rails, Ruby on Rails, railsconf, railsconf europe | Comments

RailsConf Europe 2006

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

I just booked my place at the European Ruby on Rails conference being held on the 14th and 15th of September in London. If you are going drop me a line.

Posted in Conference, Development, Event, London, Rails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, September, booked, ticket | Comments

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