How to Scale Your Ruby on Rails Web Application

If you have a Ruby on Rails web application that’s getting tons of traffic, you might be having trouble managing the traffic spikes, or need to make sure that your web application can handle more load without crashing. To help with this, here are some useful tips on how to scale your Ruby on Rails web application to handle as much traffic as possible while still maintaining performance at an acceptable level. You may also want to check out our top 10 tips on how to build a Ruby on Rails app if you haven’t already done so.

Divide Your Code Into Modules

The first step in scaling your ruby on rails development company is to divide your code into small, modular pieces. Modules allow you break up large chunks of code into more manageable pieces that can be run independently. In practice, creating modules is a simple exercise. For example, assume you have a large controller with multiple actions, such as show, update, and delete. These all have database access logic, so you could move them into their own methods inside of that controller.

Use Database Caching

To scale any application, you have to make sure you’re using your database efficiently. This can be hard when lots of users are accessing it at once, but there’s a way around that: caching. A cache is an in-memory version of a database table that is automatically updated as changes are made in your original tables.

Set up Monitoring & Alerts

The first step in scaling your application is to set up monitoring and alerts. With a little configuration, you can track any time an error occurs and receive notifications. In addition, you can send yourself (or others) emails when issues arise. For some quick solutions, check out Sentry or PagerDuty. If you don’t mind spending some cash, look into New Relic or AppSignal.

Take Advantage of Connection Pooling

Ruby on Rails uses a database connection pool for all its queries. This means that multiple instances of your application will be able to use a single physical database connection. To take advantage of connection pooling, you just need to add pg:false to your DATABASE_URL in config/database.yml :...

Write Efficient, Reusable Code

Writing efficient, reusable code is vital when it comes to scaling. Regardless of how much hardware you throw at a Ruby application, if your code isn’t optimized for performance and scalable, it will still struggle under load. That’s why it’s so important to make your code efficient from day one. Efficient code performs well—and that means less hardware is required for acceptable performance levels.

Use Memcached or Redis Caching Solutions

To scale, caching is your best friend. Memcached and Redis are two popular choices for production environments—one’s an in-memory key-value store and one’s a networked database server.

Validate Expensive Queries Early in the Application Lifecycle

One of my favorite tricks is to validate expensive queries in development, before they end up in production. Since I already have a database available for testing and since our engineers typically run their own databases locally, I don’t see any reason not to do it. Here’s how you can do it

Separate Active Record from Model Data Access Layer

By default, ruby on rails development company in usa your model’s Active Record data access layer with the model itself. You can use has_many :through and belongs_to :through associations to separate these into two classes, but doing so requires a lot of extra code that developers frequently forget or ignore. Better yet, consider using an object-relational mapping (ORM) library such as DataMapper instead of Active Record.

Simplify Data Access Using a Non-Relational Database (e.g. NoSQL database like MongoDB, DynamoDB, etc.)

By scaling our Ruby on Rails web application, we have some options for simplifying data access. As long as we’re confident that there will not be too many requests at once, we can use a non-relational database (e.g.

Optimize Network Traffic with HTTP Cache and Compression

HTTP cache and compression have been a staple of ruby on rails development services since its inception. The ability to reduce network traffic is a fundamental skill that can be applied in all sizes of applications, from small one-page personal websites up through high-traffic corporate sites. If you’re not using HTTP cache and compression, you should definitely start. If you are using these techniques but haven’t optimized them fully, there’s probably more performance you can squeeze out of your site.

Set up a Reverse Proxy Solution (e.g. Varnish, Nginx, etc.)

One of the easiest ways to scale your web application is by setting up a reverse proxy (e.g. Varnish, Nginx, etc.). These proxy servers sit in front of your app and serve requests before they reach your app. One advantage of these reverse proxies is that they can cache content so that you don’t have to hit your database every time someone loads a page. They also allow you to invalidate old cache versions when things change upstream so that visitors receive fresh content.