Rails - Sep 2005 - Development environment for large projects?

I''m curious what people are using as their environment during
development?

We''re looking at rewriting a code-heavy site (1.3MB Perl) in Rails.  A 
quick-and-dirty test to see what we are dealing with was to get the Typo 
example project (about the largest sample project I could find), and 
artifically beefing up one of the controller with 720KB of Ruby code (a 
method/function which never gets called).  The result is going from 80KB 
of Ruby to 800KB, and a very slow site (10-30 seconds per reload on a 
3.2GHz P4, FastCGI/Apache, development mode).

Now, switching to production under Apache/FastCGI is fast (> 40 
pages/sec), which is great.  But, I fear that as we progress during 
development, it''s going to get more and more painful to reload a page
to
see changes made in controller code.

Are other folks out there working on Ruby-heavy sites?  How do you develop?


Phil

On 9/19/05, Philip Edelbrock
<phil-RqHDiG/X+WF8uvyFNTHIBg@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> 
> I''m curious what people are using as their environment during
development?
> 
> We''re looking at rewriting a code-heavy site (1.3MB Perl) in
Rails.  A
> quick-and-dirty test to see what we are dealing with was to get the Typo
> example project (about the largest sample project I could find), and
> artifically beefing up one of the controller with 720KB of Ruby code (a
> method/function which never gets called).  The result is going from 80KB
> of Ruby to 800KB, and a very slow site (10-30 seconds per reload on a
> 3.2GHz P4, FastCGI/Apache, development mode).
> 
> Now, switching to production under Apache/FastCGI is fast (> 40
> pages/sec), which is great.  But, I fear that as we progress during
> development, it''s going to get more and more painful to reload a
page to
> see changes made in controller code.
> 
> Are other folks out there working on Ruby-heavy sites?  How do you develop?
I think the trick is not to put almost a megabyte of code in a single
file.  Then you won''t have that problem.

I suppose you could say I''m developing quite a code heavy site for a
client at the minute as its a total rewrite and rebranding of an
application that originally took 3 Java devs nearly 2 years to write.
The originally code base runs into hundreds of thousand of lines of code.

Currently the RoR version is around half done and is just shy of 3.5MB 
of code for the controllers, models and any modules. This doesn''t 
include the views however. And some things could of probably been done 
in a more succinct way.

My controllers and models aren''t really that large as I use a lot of 
mixins and I''ve found that if a controller has grown too large it is 
usually because it is trying to do too much and needs to refactored into 
smaller more fine grained controllers.

To be honest I and neither the testers have found any real slow down 
over the course of the project. In fact a lot of people have told me how 
much more responsive it is over the Java app its replacing.

Cheers

Jonathan

AgileEvolved Ltd
http://www.agileevolved.com




Joe Van Dyk wrote:
> On 9/19/05, Philip Edelbrock
<phil-RqHDiG/X+WF8uvyFNTHIBg@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
>>I''m curious what people are using as their environment during
development?
>>
>>We''re looking at rewriting a code-heavy site (1.3MB Perl) in
Rails.  A
>>quick-and-dirty test to see what we are dealing with was to get the Typo
>>example project (about the largest sample project I could find), and
>>artifically beefing up one of the controller with 720KB of Ruby code (a
>>method/function which never gets called).  The result is going from 80KB
>>of Ruby to 800KB, and a very slow site (10-30 seconds per reload on a
>>3.2GHz P4, FastCGI/Apache, development mode).
>>
>>Now, switching to production under Apache/FastCGI is fast (> 40
>>pages/sec), which is great.  But, I fear that as we progress during
>>development, it''s going to get more and more painful to reload
a page to
>>see changes made in controller code.
>>
>>Are other folks out there working on Ruby-heavy sites?  How do you
develop?
> 
> 
> I think the trick is not to put almost a megabyte of code in a single
> file.  Then you won''t have that problem.

Jonathan Conway wrote:
> I suppose you could say I''m developing quite a code heavy site for
a
> client at the minute as its a total rewrite and rebranding of an
> application that originally took 3 Java devs nearly 2 years to write.
> The originally code base runs into hundreds of thousand of lines of code.
> 
> Currently the RoR version is around half done and is just shy of 3.5MB 
> of code for the controllers, models and any modules. This doesn''t 
> include the views however. And some things could of probably been done 
> in a more succinct way.
> 
> My controllers and models aren''t really that large as I use a lot
of
> mixins and I''ve found that if a controller has grown too large it
is
> usually because it is trying to do too much and needs to refactored into 
> smaller more fine grained controllers.
> 
> To be honest I and neither the testers have found any real slow down 
> over the course of the project. In fact a lot of people have told me how 
> much more responsive it is over the Java app its replacing.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Jonathan
> 
> AgileEvolved Ltd
> http://www.agileevolved.com
> 
> 
That''s good to hear.  What setup are you using for development?  (e.g. 
Apache/FCGI/MySQL/environment=Development?)


Phil

Thats pretty much what I''m using on development. I''ve got
nearly the
same setup as on the staging and live box. Its using Apache, mod_proxy 
with lighttpd, FCGI and MySQL. Environment on my dev box is set to 
development.
The actual development machine is a dual powermac G5 2GHZ OS X 10.4, 
with the staging and live box being dual 2.4GHZ xeons, running Freebsd 
5.3 and 2GB of ram.


Hope this helps

Jonathan


Philip Edelbrock wrote:
> 
> That''s good to hear.  What setup are you using for development? 
(e.g.
> Apache/FCGI/MySQL/environment=Development?)
> 
> 
> Phil

AgileEvolved Ltd
http://www.agileevolved.com