Performance

In case you haven't noticed, Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 are significantly slower than 1.8.7 at loading Rails 3 apps; as a result, Rails 3 apps' startup takes much longer, affecting - for example - testing. Here's a quick tip on how to patch the latest stable version of Ruby to improve startup time with Rails 3 apps.

If you are using (or planning to use) syslog for web apps logging, you should think twice if you care about performance. Here's why some investigation revealed that switching to syslog had killed one of our applications.

In this second part, I'll describe the steps I have taken to move my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll, while preserving the site's layout, structure and -more importantly- SEO characteristics. If you also aren't happy with Wordpress for a reason or another and have decided to migrate, here's all you need to know.

Wordpress is a fully featured CMS that makes a great choice for blogging. However, after just three months, I decided Wordpress wasn't for me, and started to look for alternatives that would be easier for me to manage and customise as Ruby developer. Enter Jekyll. Here, in this first part, is why I don't think I will ever want to go back to a CMS like Wordpress.

Over the years several techniques have been developed to address the embedding of custom fonts in web pages; here's which ones you should use, and why, with a particular attention to the implications that custom font embedding may have for your site's usability, accessibility and SEO value, as well as the impact on performance and security concerns.

We've seen in the previous posts how the awesome_print Ruby gem can be used to prettify also application logs, to make their content more readable. It may sound like a good idea, but you're warned: it can kill performance.

I have just published a tiny gem, called tableless_model. It includes some functionality I have used quite often in my recent projects, which can help reduce database complexity, and improve performance, by replacing tables and associations with fewer tables storing serialised data instead.