Nate Berkopec
speedshop.co · Personal blog · on HN since 2016
Nate Berkopec writes about Ruby and Rails performance, covering Puma, memory use, garbage collection, and ActiveRecord.
What HN saysCommenters cite it for the claim that page weight matters less than assumed, and for HTTP/2 and Ruby server tuning advice.
15HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
14stories submitted
108story points
1 year agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1ActiveRecord Mistakes3 people · 5 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 2Malloc Can Double Multithreaded Ruby Program Memory Usage2 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 3Gitlab sped up Puma using sleep sort2 people · 5 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 4Understanding Ruby GC Through GC.stat2 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 5Page Weight Doesn't Matter2 people · 1 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 6Is Ruby Too Slow for Web-Scale?1 people · 84 points · first shared 2017 · 94 comments on HN
- 7Rack-Mini-Profiler – The Secret Weapon of Ruby and Rails Speed1 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 8How to Measure Ruby App Performance with New Relic1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 9Configuring Puma, Unicorn and Passenger for Maximum Efficiency1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 10Blog1 people · first shared 2017
- 11Scaling ruby apps to 1000 rpm1 people · first shared 2018
- 12Homepage1 people · first shared 2019
- 13What http2 means for ruby developers1 people · first shared 2018
What HN people wrote when they linked it
intertextuality · 2019-02-10
It all comes down to what you're doing. To put it another way: it depends. Obviously, writing logic in Go can boost performance, but one needs to assess that that's where the slowdown actually is first. One can also eke out a lot more speed from ruby/rails than you'd think! [0]
For a lot of people (and businesses), Ruby more than suffices. If it doesn't, other languages always exist. So no, Ruby is far from doomed–one just needs to evaluate the pros and cons of Ruby vs something like Go, etc. Ruby with Rails isn't hype or sexy technology, but it is quite mature and robust.
[0]: https://www.speedshop.co/
nathan_f77 · 2018-10-22
This sounds great! Are there any things I need to watch out for before switching from Puma to Falcon? And is it production-ready now, or does it still need some time to mature and have feature parity with other web servers?
This is a great article about the different Ruby web servers (from 2015): https://www.speedshop.co/2015/07/29/scaling-ruby-apps-to-1000-rpm.html
Would be great to have a comparison with Falcon. Also, speaking of performance, I still need to set up jemalloc. Have heard lots of good things about that.
jameslk · 2020-11-19
Unpopular truth: Lowering page weight doesn't often help web performance.
https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matter.html
> Bandwidth is not the problem, and the performance of the web will not improve as broadband access becomes more widespread.
> The problem is latency. Most of our networking protocols require a lot of round-trips. Each of those round trips imposes a latency penalty. Latency is governed, at the end of the day, by the speed of light. Which means that latency isn’t going anywhere.
Of course, this will get downvoted on an all-text forum. That won't make it less true.
lixtra · 2018-10-22
Don’t you have an nginx/Apache in front? If you tell it to serve HTTP/2 don’t you already get 95% of the benefits?
EDIT: e.g. bottom of https://www.speedshop.co/2016/01/07/what-http2-means-for-ruby-develope…
nateberkopec · 2017-05-04
Not sure. My blog uses Milligram inlined into the head tag: https://www.speedshop.co/blog/