Peppy Heppy

I have been working on some projects that require me to do multiple serial webservice calls using soap and http clients. As you might guess without concurrency its such a waste waiting for the network IO and its ends up being accumulative in times—the more service calls the slower it gets (.5s+1s+2s+1s+1s = 5.5seconds). Originally I wasn’t worried because I knew I would come back and tweak the performance by using threads and so today was the day for me to get it going. Before I got too crazy coding i wanted to run some basic benchmarks just to see if it would really end up making things faster. Here is what I did:

Benchmark.bm { |rep| 
  rep.report("non-threading") { 
    1.upto(100) { |count|
      amount_rest = rand(4)
      # puts "##{count}: sleeping for #{amount_rest}" 
      sleep(amount_rest)
      # puts "##{count}: woke up from a #{amount_rest} second sleep" 
    }
  }

  rep.report("threading") { 
    threads = []
    1.upto(100) { |c|
      threads << Thread.new(c) { |count| 
        amount_rest = rand(4)
        # puts "##{count}: sleeping for #{amount_rest}" 
        sleep(amount_rest)
        # puts "##{count}: woke up from a #{amount_rest} second sleep" 
      }
    }
    while !(threads.map(&:status).uniq.compact.size == 1 and threads.map(&:status).uniq.compact.first == false)
     # puts "will check back soon" 
     sleep(0.3)
    end
  }
}

benchmark        user     system      total        real
non-threading  0.100000   0.290000   0.390000 (142.005792)
threading          0.010000   0.020000   0.030000 (  3.182716)

As you can see, the threading in Ruby works really well as long as each thread is not doing anything CPU intensive. Even though ruby 1.8.7 does not support native threads, the threading, as you can see above, does work well. When all was said and done, I ended up making more than a 100% improvement and it will work a bit better if and when we have to do more requests concurrently.

I do however look forward to using ruby 1.9, but this will do the trick for me now.

I host this blog on slicehost and used to have a couple of slices, one for rails, and one for client sites, php, email etc. Just a few hours ago I moved my blog from my Rails slice to what I call my CPanel slice using passenger and the process was smooth sailing. In the process I decided to leverage what I learned about Cpanel and Passenger and I created a gem called cpanel-passenger which can be found on github.

The gem just installs a command called cpanel-passenger that takes a bunch of parameters to modify the Apache config in a way that will not make Cpanel upset.

There is a lot of work to do to make this script do all that one would want, but at least it makes setting up a rails app on passenger a simpler task with Cpanel. Feel free to fork the gem and add to it. Its just a matter of time and the Cpanel folks will bundle passenger as a supported module, but until then try this out on your VPS that is running Cpanel.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: This worked for Rails < 2.0, but now you should follow something like this

Rails routes are a critical piece of a rails application. One issue about the routes is that there isn’t a default route for the home page of an application. Typically, one would create a controller and create a route for a default controller and default action. Here is what one of mine looks like:

map.root :controller => 'main', :action => 'home'

There is one problem with this. The url http://domain.com/blah%20blah will go to the main controller and will throw an “no action/ no id given” exception which will result in a 500 error. This is not what you want for SEO or otherwise.

The solution is quite simple, all you have to do is add a method missing to the main controller and add a method missing that logs and renders a real 404 page and http status.

  def method_missing(method, *args)
    logger.warn "action #{method} dos not exist, 404" 
    render :file => File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'public', '404.html'), :status => 404
  end

There may be better ways to do this, but this is one way around the false 500 errors, especially if your likely to get old inbound links to your site.

I have been working on optimizing my companies site after porting over many features. I have been finding the newer rails performance tools including the request profiler to be very helpful in this effort. Ryan Bates put out a great screencast on request profiling that will get you started, but if your app has any complexity, you will find out quickly like I did that the html file gets too large and is not very helpful when it crashes your browser. ;)

Assuming that you have already installed KCacheGrind on your Mac using fink, you can do the following:

# Open up the request_profiler.rb in the actionpack gem (the code that is used by ./script/performance/request)

mate /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.2.2/lib/action_controller/request_profiler.rb

# Add the following lines of ruby to the show_profile_results method at the bottom.

        File.open "#{RAILS_ROOT}/tmp/profile-call-tree.kcg", 'w' do |file|
           RubyProf::CallTreePrinter.new(results).print(file)
           `kcachegrind #{file.path}` if options[:open]
        end

Now next time you run the request profiler you will see the KCacheGrind open up with the call tree output in it, yeah!

TIP: If you change the sessions store in rails, I would recommend also changing the session_id so your app doesn’t blow up with 500 errors on every request.

I changed the store from cookie based sessions (the default) to memcached based sessions.

Ever needed to automatically add a hidden field in a form? Here is what I did to make it happen.

Not sure if its the best solution, but it worked for me… at least until the next rails release. ;)

In the original form_for code it creates a form tag which prints out the templates in the blog that is passed to it. There is a method that creates the opening form tag and it already creates extra_tags. All I do it add an additional concatenated string to the fields with the result of a custom method that I created called my_custom_extra_tags. Anything the method returns will be added to each form.

module ActionView::Helpers::FormTagHelper

  # form_tag_html overridden on line 454 in actionpack-2.2.2/lib/action_view/helpers/form_tag_helper.rb

  # original
  # def form_tag_html(html_options)
  #   extra_tags = extra_tags_for_form(html_options)
  #   tag(:form, html_options, true) + extra_tags
  # end

  # modified
  def form_tag_html(html_options)
    extra_tags = extra_tags_for_form(html_options)
    tag(:form, html_options, true) + extra_tags + my_custom_extra_tags
  end

  def my_custom_extra_tags
     (params[:lightview].blank? ? '' : hidden_field_tag(:lightview, params[:lightview]))
  end

end

I used this to show the same controller action with different templates and in my application controller I determine which template to show from a passed in parameter that cannot be lost or the template will revert back to the default template. Now all I have to do is pass a parameter lightview to the iframe source and the correct template will show before and after the form inside the iframe is submitted.

Hope this was helpful.

Tonight I attended a presentation at Google that given by Jason Hoffman (the CTO at Joyent) about Ruby, and scaling web architecture. Although none of the actual information was new to me it did remind me of the basic points to scaling a web application. Here they are.

• Scalability is language, performance, and throughput independent.

• Test each piece of your architecture and find out what the maximums of each service are.

• Find the real bottlenecks and remove them efficiently. (Use DTrace) An example was how Apache’s proxy module will limit the number of requests per second to 140 per Apache instance, and by using virtualization you could have eight instances running Apache on the same server with the capacity of 1120 rps.

Overall it was worth while especially when you factor in the snacks and dinner that Google provided.

Scale away!

In one of my last posts I showed how I was able to create completely custom urls for SEO, but there is an issue that sometimes comes up when creating custom urls or when migrating urls, etc.

Here is a simple way to ensure that urls that are being requested are valid. Google and Yahoo! (and others) crawl your sites links and can on occasion come across an incorrect ink from someone else’s site that may be old or mistyped. There are some stiff penalties associated with having two different urls pointing to the same page. There may also be a need to retire certain urls or to change the way they are formated.

Here is an example, the URL:

http://domain.com/d-123456-mountain_viewering

Should be redirected to:

http://domain.com/d-123456-mountain_view

Here is the simple solution:

I created a module that looked like the following in the lib directory and included it into the ActionController class.

include ActiveRecord

module MY
  module URL

    def page_code_object_map
      { 
        'd' => Destination, 'p' => Photo
      }
    end

    def execute_url_post_process
      canonicalize if params[:canonicalize]
    end

    def canonicalize

      whole_url   = request.request_uri().split('?')[0].split('#')[0]
      url_pieces  = current_url.split('-')
      page_type   = url_pieces[0].gsub(/\//, '')
      type_id     = url_pieces[1]

      begin
        object = page_code_object_map[page_type].find(type_id)
        canonical_url = send "custom_#{page_type}_path", object, params
      rescue RecordNotFound => e
        render :file => File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'public', '404.html'), :status => 404
        return
      end

      if canonical_url and canonical_url != whole_url
        headers['Status'] = '301 Moved Permanently'
        redirect_to("#{http_base}#{canonical_url}", :status => 301)
      end

    end

  end
end

ActionController::Base.send :include, MY::URL
ActionView::Base.send :include, MY::URL

In the route below, notice that I am passing a parameter named :canonicalize with the value of true. This parameter is passed through to the controller as a request parameter and can be accessed in the params hash.

map.d '/d-:destination_global_id-:name*other_params', :controller => 'destinations', :action => 'show', :canonicalize => true, :destination_global_id => /\d{1,20}/, :name => /[^-]+/

How does this all work you say? Simple. In your application controller (controllers/application.rb) you need to include something like this:

before_filter :execute_url_post_process

This will start the checking process by calling the execute_url_post_process() method defined above in my module. If the route that matches passes the :cononicalize parameter, the conanicalize() method will get the current url and certain important pieces. Then depending on the object that is mapped to the page code (d) it will reconstruct the url of the destination object that should match the existing url. If it matches then were golden, if it doesn’t then we redirect to the new/correct url ensuring that we do not loose page rank or be counted as spam (duplicate content).

There are many things that you can do within this code. Some of them include managing authorization, hiding pages, etc.

I hope you enjoyed this tip. If you have any suggestions, please post them, I am sure some genius will have something to add. :)

I needed to build urls that were packed with keywords for SEO. I needed to make sure that the url more fully described the contents of the page.

This default rails url does not cut it.

/destinations/12345

This does cut it.

/d-12345-mountain_view

So here is the hack that I did to get the desired affect. (Suggestions or insults on my approach are welcomed!)

First, I added this code into a plugin that I was using for our custom routes stuff. You can probably add this to the environment.rb file or better yet to a a file within lib and just make sure that you require the file from within environment.rb. I really needed to add the ’-’ as a delimiter.

This is step is important because by default rails uses slashes (/) as a dilimeter for parts of the url, but by adding a dash (-) to the array things work the way they should.

module ActionController
  module Routing
    SEPARATORS = %w( / ; . , ? -)  
  end
end

Then I added a named route (config/routes.rb) that looked something like this:

map.d '/d-:destination_global_id-:name*other_params', :controller => 'destinations', :action => 'show', :canonicalize => true, :destination_global_id => /\d{1,20}/, :name => /[^-]+/

Now we can create helper methods that take all of these wonderful parameters.

def custom_d_path(destination, params={})
  d_path(
    destination.global_id, 
    string_for_url(destination.name)
  ) + (params.size > 0 ? create_other_parameters(params) : "")
end                                                

The method string_for_url() just replaced spaces with underscored and removed illegal characters.

The create_other_parameters() appended parameters in a subtle way that ensured that Google and Yahoo! wouldn’t get prejudice about dynamic pages with parameters. (This is another topic for another time.)

In short, now we can simply call custom_d_path(destination) from any view (or controller if we included the helper in both ActionView and ActionController classes).

I realize that there may be a better way to do this to make it simpler to code, but this is a simple example of a way to solve this problem.

Now for a couple of caveats:

1. For those who have OCRD (obsesive compulsive REST disorder) the urls may not suite your style. I use them for the read only pages of a site.
2. You may not need to go to this extreme to keyword pack your urls… there are many other approaches that may be more robust and easier to implement.

Hopefully this example helps someone. :)

A half hour ago I released a game that I designed with the help of a friend and the input from my team members. The game took just under three weeks from inception to completion, and I also moved with my family to a new apartment as well.

It was fun to work on this project and I hope that it is successful.

Oh, on a more technical note, I wrote the game using Rails 2.0 with no plugins and only a handful of tables. It was fun on every level.

Now here comes the real question… can you beat me to where ever it is you want to go? If you are reading this, please invite me to your race (Paul Hepworth/ dderby[at]omniop[dot]com.)

Here is the link: http://realtravel.com/ddracing

You can also get to the game by going to any RealTravel destination page and click the “play” button when prompted.

Thanks again Phil for your creative flare major contribution.

Almost a year ago I was asked to work on a project with a designer to build a rails site that lists designers and their portfolios. it was a fun project overall and was during my nights and weekends over the period of a couple of months. Although my work was done for quite sometime the site didn’t technically release until a short time ago. Anyways, I coded it up and although the project was a little too large for my side-project taste it was fun.

You can check it out by going to: http://indiefashionhouse.com

Recently I have been configuring Mongrel and Capistrano for a few apps that I have been working on. I use FastCGI on shared hosts, but if I have a bit more control on a VPS or a dedicated server I prefer to use Mongrel since it is easier to install and configure and it is also more stable. Here is what I do to get a Mongrel cluster up and running using Capistrano and the extension that Jamis Buck also wrote named Multistage.

Make sure you have ruby, rails, capistrano, capistrano-ext, mongrel, palmtree and mongrel_cluster gems installed on your system.

To generate your cluster files you can run the following commands with your specific details of course. ;)

~ $ cd rails_app
~/rails_app $ mongrel_rails cluster::configure -e development -c "/home/www/apps/web2.0app.com" -p 8000 -N 4 -C config/mongrel_development.yaml
~/rails_app $ mongrel_rails cluster::configure -e staging -c "/home/www/apps/web2.0app.com" -p 8010 -N 4 -C config/mongrel_staging.yaml
~/rails_app $ mongrel_rails cluster::configure -e production -c "/home/www/apps/web2.0app.com" -p 8020 -N 4 -C config/mongrel_production.yaml

Now all you need to do is configure Capistrano config/deploy.rb file to make use of these cluster files and the Multistage extension for Capistrano. If you don't how to setup Multistage, you can do a search for it or read my other post in it.

require 'palmtree/recipes/mongrel_cluster'
set :stages, %w(staging production development)
set :default_stage, "development"
require 'capistrano/ext/multistage'
...
set(:mongrel_conf) { "#{current_path}/config/mongrel_cluster.yml" }
...
deploy.task :after_update_code, :roles => [:web] do
  desc "Copying the right mongrel cluster config for the current stage environment."
  run "cp -f #{release_path}/config/mongrel_#{stage}.yml #{release_path}/config/mongrel_cluster.yml"
end

In order for the correct mongrel cluster to start you will need to have a recipe in your deploy that ensures that the correct cluster file is renamed to the config/mongrel_cluster.yml and then it is used by Capistranos' mongrel:cluster:restart task.

Admittedly there are many more things that need to be done before and after this little tip, but I thought that this may help someone who may need to bridge their understanding of how easy it is to solve the Mongrel cluster on different stages problem.

A few months ago I was working on a project that required me to setup credit card processing. My client already had a merchant account using the Verifi gateway and instead of talking my client into using a different gateway or doing something from scratch, i figured i would just add support for Verifi for the Active Merchant Rails plug-in and then give back the code to the plug-in project. So if you are using the Verifi payment gateway you have a great rails plug-in with support for it.

Lets be open about this, Rich McIver sent me an email informing me that he had written an article on "74 Quality Ruby on Rails Resources and Tutorials." My immediate thought was "what? who? why?" but then I went to the article and after reading through it I found myself interested in the articles that he had put together. Good job Rich for the great article and for the 74 handpicked resources -- even if the number 74 is one article shy of 75. Okay, who is going to write the 75th resource now?

Oh, yeah! before I forget, here is the link to Richs article.

74 Quality Ruby on Rails Resources and Tutorials

With all of the resources out there on Rails, its nice to have a quality list.

I have been attending the Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails Meetup since the first meeting a year ago this next May (or so.) I am surprised at the number of people that show up and their purpose in coming. it started out with just a few computer geeks who love Ruby and Rails and now I think half of the attendees tonight were VCs, companies looking for Rails engineers, or people looking for partners for their next big idea for a web app.

I think its great but I have to admit it must be a sign of the times.

Ruby on Rails is here to stay and even companies like Spock (spock.com) are building large apps with it with 9M$ in VC.

now all I have to do is figure out a way to use Rails more since I don’t get the pleasure currently at my day job. :)