How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby

I thought we all learned popularity does not correlate with quality. It correlates pretty closely with corporate inertia and perceived lower risk of developer churn though. Businesses love tech stack for which there are bigger pools of programmers. Says nothing of the quality of the stacks.

> If you're measuring hardware loads and busting out your stopwatch to measure response times, then sure.

Needlessly snarky. Response times matter in a lot of businesses. Count yourself lucky that it hasn't been an important metric in your work.

> Have fun writing Ecto queries by hand

I do have fun writing those. Most times the code in my functions ends up more readable than the equivalent Rails code I wrote years ago. There are some exceptions where you have to dig deeper. Haven't seen a framework -- Rails included -- that lets you handle all complex cases with zero deeper digging needed. At one point you do have to understand SQL and query optimizations, no ways around it.

> wiring up document storage on your own

What for?

> trying to find a standout auth library of choice like devise

It's called Pow and works very well. Additionally, Elixir's maintainers themselves are authoring such a library at the moment.

> finding a library that makes managing database views less of a pain

We can argue if this is a good thing until the Sun explodes. It really depends on the business. I have consulted for businesses where it was very important and true enough, using a library that's well-tuned for classic web apps (like Ecto and ActiveRecord) isn't the best idea there.

> wiring up end-to-end system testing

For 3.5 years with Elixir this is the first time I hear that this is a problem. Any data to back this up?

> I'll be over here running rails new, wiring up sidekiq to ActiveJob, and building shit with ease.

More power to you. Rails is excellent for an MVP or a prototype and this is well-known. It's what comes after is what has burned me out of it. Its maintenance burden is much higher than many others, including PHP's Laravel.

https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

PostgreSQL is obviously not written in ruby, but the other components are very much "ruby code". There appears to be c/Java extension for ssl and parsing http, though - but AFAIK the main server is ruby.

https://github.com/puma/puma/tree/master/ext/puma_http11

Tangential, but you might enjoy:

https://deno.land/v1#http-server-performance

> A hello-world Deno HTTP server does about 25k requests per second with a max latency of 1.3 milliseconds. A comparable Node program does 34k requests per second with a rather erratic max latency between 2 and 300 milliseconds.

> Deno's HTTP server is implemented in TypeScript on top of native TCP sockets. Node's HTTP server is written in C and exposed as high-level bindings to JavaScript. We have resisted the urge to add native HTTP server bindings to Deno, because we want to optimize the TCP socket layer, and more generally the op interface.

> If local by design, that wouldn't exactly cover the use case of "Redis in front of an army of $other_language workers", correct? And I guess it's accepted as costing slightly more cache misses, but with the benefit of more decentralization / node independence / resiliency, right?

Yes and yes.

Erlang/Elixir don't strive to make distributed caches. I wrote apps that have been scaled to 5 separate servers and each server has their own local cache (running inside the Erlang BEAM VM). Takes a little more time to warm the caches up on restarts but it has never been an issue so far.

The ETS tables ownership is trivial to hand out to another process if the owner dies (look for the "heir" option in ETS docs) but libraries like Cachex (linked at the bottom) and Ane (linked in my previous comment) wrap the ownership worries away from you.

What's left for you is just an uber-performant cache.

Do take a look at Cachex. It's hassle-free and just works.

[0] https://github.com/whitfin/cachex

> "Erlang/Elixir don't strive to make distributed caches. I've wrote apps that have been scaled to 5 separate servers and each server has their own cache. Takes a little more to warm the caches up on restarts but it has never been an issue so far."

Yeah that's what I figured, makes total sense. Got into exactly the same thinking designing a circuit breaker at work. Better to let individual nodes do their own circuit breaking rather than introduce state, the complexity savings largely exceed the small cost of a little extra time needed to circuit break.

My point is that it doesn't come with Phoenix out of the box (unless something has changed?), and that difference in philosophy is the core of what I'm getting at. With rails new I'm getting an end-to-end test suite and chrome driver installation for free.

Phoenix also has no plans of implementing something similar to ActiveStorage do they? How about ActiveJob now that elixir developers have rediscovered how great a queueing system is with the adoption of Oban?. Will Phoenix ever make a move to include something like ActionText?

They won't even consider adding basic things for developer productivity like undoing a generator.

https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/2607 https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/1597

The Rails team is much quicker and happier to extract something out of the companies supporting it (Basecamp, GitHub, Shopify, etc) and include it directly in the framework, whereas the Phoenix team seems much less willing to take a "batteries" included approach.

There's a balance of making something easy to use and making something "technically superior". The Rails team seems to care much more deeply about what the framework feels like to use, and the Phoenix team cares more about building something that is "dogmatically perfect" (which you're correlating with quality).

What's easier for someone to learn?

rails g model article title body user:references

mix phx.gen.html Content Article articles title body

I understand what they're going for here, but I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it. If Phoenix wants to increase their adoption, then I think they need to accept that things like this matter.