Rails Performance Techniques

The faster your application runs, the better experience for your users. In this series, we'll cover Rails performance techniques like counter caches, fragment caching, memoization, database indexes, CDNs, and more.

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14m

14 Lessons | 3h 2m | Intermediate

14m

Fragment Caching And oEmbed

Jan 23, 2015 Pro

Learn how oEmbed works to dynamically grab embed codes from a URL and how we can use fragment caching to make this more efficient

17m

Memoization

Mar 30, 2016

Use memoization to your advantage to cache results in memory to improve speed

18m

GoRails Performance - The Techniques I Use

Apr 11, 2016

Learn how I design GoRails for speed and performance on all layers of the stack

27m

Russian Doll Caching with Rails 5

Apr 22, 2016 Pro

Learn how to implement efficient Russian Doll Caching with Rails 5

15m

Advanced Caching with User Permissions and Authorization

Apr 26, 2016 Pro

Learn how to use Javascript to enable user permissions and authorization in generic caches

15m

Improving Query Performance with Database Indexes

May 17, 2016

Learn how to improve the speed of your database queries by adding database indexes to your tables

Speed up Rails boot times with Bootsnap

Sep 06, 2017

Learn how Bootsnap speeds up your Ruby and Rails app boot times by preloading the load paths and caching Ruby bytecode

Amazon Cloudfront CDN for Rails Asset Pipeline & Webpacker

Jun 25, 2019 Pro

A CDN can distribute assets globally and allow more parallel downloads. This equates to performance benefits for users anywhere in the world

Caching with Etags

Jul 20, 2020 Pro

One fantastic way to improve Rails performance is by using Etags to help the browser keep track if a page has changed or not. This can help Rails skip rendering views entirely and save lots of time.

Rails Fragment Caching with Permissions

Jan 20, 2021 Pro

Fragment caches can be hard when users have different permissions and are allowed to do different things. We can solve this problem with a little Javascript and greatly improve the usefulness of our fragment caches.

Parallel ActiveRecord Queries with load_async in Rails 7

Nov 11, 2021 Pro

Complex queries can slow your page rendering down. We can now run long queries in parallel with Rails 7's load_async method in ActiveRecord to speed up page rendering.

14m

How to Write C Extensions for Ruby Gems

Dec 20, 2021 Pro

C extensions are a powerful tool to connect Ruby code with C libraries that can perform much faster than a pure Ruby counterpart.

12m

Rails Caching with Memcached

Jan 16, 2023

Rails ships with support for using Memcached as the cache storage. Memcached is an open source, key value store that is designed primarily for caching. Out of the box it is configured to automatically expire old cache keys and can easily be scaled up with

Exploring PostgreSQL Tuples Rails PR

Jul 07, 2025 Pro

Rails tracks the row count and affected rows for queries made with ActiveRecord. A recent PR makes a tiny, but important change to the PostgreSQL adapter to make the row count significantly more efficient.