For something that is touted as being an “easy” to use framework, Rails is a pretty complex beast. Over the years it has progressed from a seemingly simple framework that “anyone” can learn to the intricate collection of add-ons, gems and extensions that make it the power house it is now.

Optimization is an overlooked aspect of Rails development that often isn’t covered in the tutorials you find online.  With the sheer simplicity of snapping in a few gems, throwing together some quick Active Record queries, pushing to Heroku and forgetting about the rest, it’s all too easy to find your application running slow and sluggish, before long you need to backtrack and try to figure out what exactly you did that caused the slow down.

Writing better, leaner code is often the answer, although this article isn’t a coding guide, instead I’m going to list a few simple things you can do to get better performance from your application.  These might not be applicable for everyone, but merely some tricks that iv learned that have helped me squeeze a bit more performance out of some recent projects of mine. Read More