---
title: "Ruby on Rails Performance Analysis"
description: "We measure where your Ruby on Rails application spends its time, find the real bottlenecks and fix them - backed by numbers before and after."
url: "https://qameta.com/ruby-on-rails-performance-analysis/"
---

# 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](https://qameta.com/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](https://qameta.com/ruby-on-rails-maintenance-retainer/).

Is your Rails application getting slow? [Get in touch](mailto:info@qameta.com).