Autotuner: How to Speed Up Your Rails App
Ruby’s garbage collector is designed to be adaptable, scaling from short Ruby scripts to running apps that serve millions of requests per second. While it’s designed to be adaptable, it may not work optimally for every use case. For this reason, Ruby’s garbage collector supports many (19 at the time of writing) parameters that can be used to tune it. However, the use of these parameters requires knowledge of how the garbage collector works on the inside. It also doesn’t help that there are changes to the garbage collector in every major Ruby release, meaning that some of these parameters may become deprecated and new ones may be added. This implies that you’ll need to understand the changes and might have to retune the garbage collector to regain optimal performance. This complexity often deters Rails developers from tuning the garbage collector.
That’s why we created the Autotuner gem, which analyzes the traffic of your Rails app and gives you suggestions to personalize the garbage collector for your app. Setting it up should be very straightforward by following the two steps in the readme. In this article, we’ll delve into the motivations behind creating this gem, its workings, and our experimentation process with garbage collector tuning at Shopify.
