HTC, now in a faster version!
One of the bits of feedback I got doing the Neon Guild presentation a couple weeks ago is that the site was kinda slow, and the uptime rate was pretty bad! I’ll blame this on it being mostly a research project, but now that I’ve shared it with the Guild, I realized I better look into this.
A couple of changes, from big to little have been made:
- Reducing # of SQL queries to generate a page. Used to be that the common pages would require up to a couple hundread SQL queries to get all the data, now it’s a handful.
- Caching the Blog section on the homepage. The RSS feed for this blog was pulled into the homepage every time someone visited. This obviously was inefficient, and added to how slow the site was. I am now caching the content, and using the ETag header from the RSS feed to see if I need to update content. By the way, a lot of credit for making this visible goes to NewRelics Rails Performance Monitor tool.
- Background jobs are now more “backgroundy” and shouldn’t take up so many resources. They are also running more reliable, and I am able to monitor them through the Job Log interface. You too can monitor them if you join the site!
- And a little change, on an organization page we would query Yahoo for the GPS coordinates of Charlottesville every time. I realized that since Charlottesville isn’t likely to moving, barring a major Ike or Katrina hurricane, that I could probably hard code the coordinates to 38.032125, -78.477519.
