Rails - Jul 2014 - Scaling/optimizing a slow ruby on rails application.

Hi everyone,



 My name is Michael Solovyov and I'm the co-founder & CTO of a
rails-based
start-up. We have built a product for other businesses to help their users 
adopt their products. 



 We've built the application, delivered to a few customers and now we've
hit scaling and performance issues. 



 I'd love your feedback on how we proceed as we try to resolve them:



 1) These are the problems we've encountered:

The main user dashboard takes between 7-15 seconds to load. The maximum 
requests per second that we can support are 100-150. 



 2) Why we think they're happening:

We're using couchdb with an ORM that has our data modeled relationally. 
This causes the ORM to launch an extraordinary amount of http requests to 
couchdb to load all our data. The more data and users in the project, the 
longer the delay. There's also potentially inefficient code, extra loops 
etc. We're not using caching to it's fullest extent. 



 3) What we're using/what we've done:

Our architecture: rails '3.2.12', ruby 1.9.3p374, nginx + unicorn (main 
server), elasticsearch (separate server), couchdb (separate server). All on 
AWS.

We've added some view level caching where we can get away with stale data. 

We've tried using higher tiered/ssd aws servers but it doesn't look to
be
our main bottleneck.



 4) How we plan on completing it:

We're mostly done a rewrite to migrate our data and data model to 
activerecord. We've hit a snag in migrating s3 attachment code built into 
the couchdb ORM that we're using. Following the completion of the migration 
to sql/activerecord we are going to do the following in an attempt to 
increase performance:



 A. Use percono mysql server.



 B. Run tools such as bullet to analyze performance and where we might have 
bad queries/lookups.



 C. Update to latest Rails and Ruby versions.



 D. Look into Puma and paralelization of DB access calls.



 E. Break apart the application into separate services.



 5) What we don't know right now:

Whether switching to Activerecord or any of the above ideas will inherently 
give us any performance benefits. 

Whether we will have any other unexpected surprises or loss of 
functionality due to switching to ActiveRecord. 

How long this all will take and whether there's other areas that we need to 
focus to get sub 1 second performance that we're missing. 

 Do you all have any feedback/ideas/insights completing projects like these?



 In particular, I would be curious about:



 a) How would you approach it?


 b) Anything that's worked for you in the past on suitable projects?


 c) Anything to avoid doing?


 d) Where to find good additional team members & advisors to help us 
complete the project?

e) How long to expect it to take?



 


 Here are our application rake stats: 
http://pastie.org/private/qrxkytk4uur9odndydv5dq

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