The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved
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Re: The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved
#2"We didn’t have any page caching in place at all."
Cache me if you can! If you're a high-traffic site and you are not caching static content (I recommend Varnish highly), then your are throwing money or good user experience out the window.
Re: The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved
#3"We didn’t have any page caching in place at all." Cache me if you can! If you're a high-traffic site and you are not caching static content (I recommend Varnish highly), then your are throwing money or good user experience out the window.
*you're
And I agree completely. Varnish is goddamn magical and a fascinating exercise in a principled approach to kernel-oriented memory management (a mindset I don't normally undertake).
Re: The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved
#4"We didn’t have any page caching in place at all." Cache me if you can! If you're a high-traffic site and you are not caching static content (I recommend Varnish highly), then your are throwing money or good user experience out the window.
Part of Rails 4.0 will be further pushing the "Russian Doll" caching that 37signals/DHH talks about here: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to...
One of the great things I love about Rails 3 is how easy it is to start caching. It can, and does, cause issues so make sure you're including caching in your test suite. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how Rails 4 pushes this forward.
Re: The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved
#5"We didn’t have any page caching in place at all." Cache me if you can! If you're a high-traffic site and you are not caching static content (I recommend Varnish highly), then your are throwing money or good user experience out the window.
When you say static content, do you mean actual static content, or dynamic-but-still-kind-of-static? Actual static content like CSS files and background images doesn't get any benefit from varnish. Something like the HN front page, where it is dynamic but consistent for all users at a specific point in time, is what you need to put behind varnish.
Re: The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved
#6Well done guys, keep scaling and keep representing the Melbourne tech scene!
Re: The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved
#7"We didn’t have any page caching in place at all." Cache me if you can! If you're a high-traffic site and you are not caching static content (I recommend Varnish highly), then your are throwing money or good user experience out the window.
The key thing I got a bit wrong was high-traffic mostly static "content", vs high-traffic "very custom" which is a) what I was used to at envato and b) what I thought we had on our hands at goodfilms.
I think in a growing site with a lot of custom per-user content (like a social network) the extra complexity of a cache layer and managing expiry is more pain than it's worth while iterating the product quickly. If you're mostly a content site, it's definitely the #1 thing you should be doing.
Realising that we're both at the same time, depending on the user or page, means that sometimes the cache stuff is the right thing to do, and sometimes not. I was leaning too far towards not, and happy now with the balance we've picked.
Re: The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved
#8"We didn’t have any page caching in place at all." Cache me if you can! If you're a high-traffic site and you are not caching static content (I recommend Varnish highly), then your are throwing money or good user experience out the window.
The key thing I got a bit wrong was high-traffic mostly static "content", vs high-traffic "very custom" which is a) what I was used to at envato and b) what I thought we had on our hands at goodfilms. I think in a growing site with a lot of custom per-user content (like a social network) the extra complexity of a cache layer and managing expiry is more pain than it's worth while iterating the product quickly. If you'…
Absolutely. At theconversation.edu.au we run a content site—we publish the news, which is the same for everyone. This means we can cache the front page and all the articles as static HTML, and then annotate the page with user info for signed-in commenters, editorial controls for signed-in editors, and so on.
(We have a separate cookie that is present for signed-in users, so the fronted knows whether it should fire the annotation request.)
The result is that we can serve a sudden influx of unauthenticated users (e.g. from Google News or StumbleUpon) from nginx alone, which gives us massive scale from very little hardware. It's likely that the network is actually the bottleneck in this case, and not nginx.
Re: The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved
#9Great job! Can you do such page for EC2 too?
Re: The Minimum Viable Rails Stack, Now Reddit Frontpage Approved
#10Great post, it is great to see startups being open about how they architect their systems and overcome issues with scaling.
This sort of information helps people building the next group of startups save both time and money.
Keep up the great work!