Blogger Advanced -- Perf Workshop

This is a branch of the blogger project intended for a performance optimization workshop at Turing. The project includes several tweaks to produce some performance issues for students to troubleshoot, including:

Larger seed file
Switched DB to Postgres
Pre-built DB dump to expedite seeding data
Skylight.io installation to aid in diagnosing perf bottlenecks
Caching libraries included

Getting Started -- Checking Out the Branch and Loading Sample Data

Since generating a large amount of sample data via a DB seed task takes time, this branch includes a pre-built dataset in the form of a postgres DB dump. This is a data format similar to what you might use to backup a production postgres system.

A pg_dump is basically a direct snapshot of all the data contained in the DB at a given time. As such it's much quicker for your local postgres server to load all this data than it would be for you to re-generate all the data via the seed task yourself.

To get set up with the app, checkout the branch, and load the sample data, run these commands:

clone this repo

cd blogger_advanced
git checkout -t origin/blogger-perf-workshop
bundle
rake sample_data:load

If you would like to use Docker:

git clone git://github.com/turingschool-examples/blogger_advanced.git
cd blogger_advanced
git checkout -t origin/blogger-perf-workshop
docker-compose build
docker-compose up

Then, in a separate console:

docker-compose run web rake sample_data:load_docker

You should see a bunch of output from postgres as it loads up each table from the db dump. Once it finishes, you can verify your dataset by firing up a rails console and checking counts for our models:

docker-compose run web rails c
Loading development environment (Rails 4.1.10)
irb(main):001:0> Article.count
   (21.7ms)  SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "articles"
=> 70001

You can start your server using docker-compose like so:

docker-compose run web rails s

Dependencies for blogger-perf-workshop branch

This branch is intended to be a playground for exploring some additional caching and optimization features, and as such it requires a few additional dependencies. Make sure you have:

Postgres installed and running
Redis installed and running

Caching Utilities

Redis

This app comes pre-configured with Redis as its cache store. Anywhere in the app you can use Rails.cache to read or write data to/from memcached.

Using the cache, you can set a key/value pair in the cache using Rails.cache.write("key", "value") and read it using Rails.cache.read("key")

Additionally, you can use the cache helper cache { "stuff" } from within your view templates.

Remember that a cache is best used for short-term data that can be easily re-generated if it expires or gets evicted by the cache server.

Performance Auditing

This branch of blogger comes pre-configured with the NewRelic RPM agent. NewRelic includes a simplified version of the monitoring tools in the development environment. With your server running, visit http://localhost:3000/newrelic to see a quick performance summary of your recent web requests.

It should look something like:

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