Just back from RailsConf Europe. These were my three top moments:
1. Jason Hoffman's session on scaling was really superb. Over the last few months we've had to deal with scaling a Rails app urgently. Jason had sound advice and interesting perspectives.
The headline is scaling isn't a Rails problem but a network and hardware issue. Interesting things Jason suggested:
- Use multiple asset hosts to get more connections to the browser (e.g. most browsers will open only 2 connections per host, if you set up media1, 2, 3 and 4 for assets even if they all point to the same box, the browser will open up to 8 connections.
- Use DNS in a major way.
- Make separate apps for each controller and keep them on their own boxes/processes. This may sound strange, but Jason said most apps could have the following DNS (either on the same box or different ones):
- Dynamic (domain.com)
- Static (assets1-4, 5-8)
- Uploads (break into separate app)
- Downloads (unauthenticated to static servers, sixty secs urls for authenticated)
- Admin
2. Evan Phoenix spoke well on Rubinius the new Ruby virtual machine. It was a really fun talk with some carefully made up graphs and stats. The bottom line is that it is much faster, takes less memory and is much easier to fix bugs or extend as most is written in Ruby.
3. For me, the real highlights were the events surrounding the conference. Both Bratwurst on Rails on the Sunday and Reject Conf on Tuesday night were great places to meet with loads of interesting people, including the guys from SoundCloud and my fellow countrymen from Scotland on Rails.