why is my first RoR app on Dreamhost running so slow?

Question

I've got my first RoR app deployed to Dreamhost and it's using Passenger. The one note on Dreamhost's wiki about slow response mentioned changing a RewriteRules line in the public/.htaccess file to use FastCGI. But I assume this will have no effect if I'm using Passenger, is that right?

I've looked at the logs and compared them to my local logs, and it looks like there is a wider range on Dreamhost. Some responses are comparable to the quick local ones, others can take a few seconds.

I'm using a Flex front end with HTTPServices to the rails backend, and I think I also need to add logging around my services to see what kind of network delay I'm getting and try to isolate where the delays are.

I should also add that there is probably plenty of room for improvement in the area of eager loading associations. I think I did that a little early on, but haven't done it thoroughly through all the associations. I have the local logs set to the default where I can see all the queries, and there are a lot of them.

Answer 1

New Relic is a Rails performance monitoring app. I haven't personally used it, but I hear their name a lot and it looks like they have a free lite version that you could try. From my experience profiling other applications, a tool like this is worth using because the slow parts of your application are often in areas where you didn't expect.

Answer 2

You must be running in Development mode. Try running in Production mode to see if it is still slow.

Post below may help:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/566401/ruby-on-rails-is-slow