Make 43 Things Faster

As I’ll be at The Robot Co-op all of one more week, this is no longer feasible.

The database memory limits were a tad conservative, so I increased them and performed some tweaking. The database looks like its much happier now.

I ripped out our old image generation API over the weekend and replaced it with the newer one. Since our test coverage isn’t complete there are still a few dark corners I need to poke at to get things working 100%.

The new API will work after the loss of a disk (by rebuilding images from redundant copies of the originals), while the old one wouldn’t which will make the site more robust.

We were allocating over 25M per zeitgeist page, which occasionally would cause our processes to run out of memory.

Now we aren’t, which is great!

Two little bugs slipped out for a bit, both having to do with entry editing. But they’re fixed now.

Also, I made the ad parsing code much faster by parsing the ads with a regular expression instead of REXML. It doesn’t really take much time, but REXML is just bloat, bloat, bloat.

Tomorrow I’ll be able to tell what kind of difference it made.

Of course, the change will be slight.

I just checked in a change that caches entry bodies which will eliminate the load of formatting entries over and over. Hopefully it will go live tomorrow.

The website is a bit slow in places, and we don’t take advantage of enough of the nifty new things that Rails offers.

We just pushed an update using Rails 1.1 and converted a bunch of views to using partials on our slowest pages. This will give us the ability to find which parts of the page are slowest and optimize.