Most Rails developers will be familiar with *** ****’s Mongrel, a great HTTP library used by most Rails developers to either test or deploy their applications (it’s also pretty great for building your own basic HTTP handlers too, but I digress).
Sometimes when restarting applications after code updates, some requests can be “lost” in the whole process, particularly in high-traffic environments. Seesaw, developed by Max Muermann and Matt Allen, however, resolves this problem by restarting your mongrel processes one by one so that availability is ensured. Seesaw is available as a gem (gem install seesaw), although this blog post is essential reading to learn about integration with Nginx and Apache. Read More

Ben Smith takes a look at using the YSlow Firefox plugin to improve the performance of Rails-powered sites. He shows how to tweak Rails applications (and even Nginx) to satisfy some of YSlow’s recommendations. Even though he doesn’t go into much depth, it’s a good post if it helps raise the awareness of YSlow in the Rails community. As I’ve been forced to use dialup and mobile Internet lately (and the trend will continue for others with the iPhone, etc) I’ve become acutely aware of the performance differences between well developed and poorly developed sites! Read More