Ruby on Rails Performance Analysis

A slow Rails application costs you twice: users wait, and the hosting bill grows because the usual answer is “bigger server”. We find out where the time actually goes and fix the cause instead of the symptom.

Signs you need a performance analysis

• Pages or API endpoints that got slower as your data and traffic grew
• Background jobs that take hours and pile up in the queue
• Memory usage that keeps climbing until processes get restarted
• Timeouts during peak hours
• Servers that keep getting bigger without the application getting faster

How we analyze

We measure before we change anything. The slow part is rarely where you expect it, and guessing is expensive.

• Look at real production data: APM traces, request logs and job runtimes
• Rank requests and jobs by the total time they cost, not just by the slowest single call
• Profile the hot paths for CPU, memory allocations and database time
• Reproduce the problem locally or on a staging copy, so every fix can be measured against a baseline

What we typically fix

• N+1 queries and unnecessary eager loading
• Loading whole tables into Ruby to filter, count or sort them
• Missing or ineffective caching - fragment, low-level and HTTP caching
• Slow view rendering and oversized JSON responses
• Memory bloat in long-running processes
• Background jobs that process large datasets one record at a time
• Web server and job worker configuration - processes, threads and connection pools

When the database turns out to be the bottleneck, we continue with database optimization.

What you get

• A written report with the bottlenecks we found, ranked by impact and effort
• The fixes as pull requests, each with measurements before and after
• Recommendations for monitoring, so regressions are caught early

Summary

Most performance problems in Rails applications come down to a handful of requests, jobs and queries. We find them with data, fix them where it makes the biggest difference, and show you the numbers. If you want someone to keep an eye on performance continuously, it is also part of our maintenance retainer.

Is your Rails application getting slow? Get in touch.