performance

Working with our support team, I often see customers having timeout problems. Typically, their applications will start throwing H12 errors. The decision to timeout requests quickly wasn't made to avoid having long-running requests on our router, nor to only have fast apps on our platform, but because standard web servers do not handle these types of requests particularly well. How webservers work All webservers will work in a similar way. Any new request will go to a queue, and the server will process them one after the other. This means if you have 30 requests in your queue, each taking…

Performance is important, and if we can't measure something, we can't make it fast. Recently, I've had my eye on the ActionDispatch::Static middleware in Rails. This middleware gets put at the front of your stack when you set config.serve_static_assets = true in your Rails app. This middleware has to compare every request that comes in to see if it should render a file from the disk or return the request further up the stack. This post is how I was able to benchmark the middleware and give it a crazy speed boost. How ActionDispatch::Static Works Right now to serve static…