ChicagoRuby: Downtown - Tuning Legacy Rails App: How to Make an Elephant Sprint

About the Presentation. Tuning legacy apps could be very expensive; an application with more than 50,000 lines of code is costly to change. We need to figure out more pragmatic ways to tune it. First, we need ways to measure performance. Otherwise, we cannot prove that suggested changes are improving performance. Using nightly builds and building performance test suites help in measuring and monitoring performance. Use of caching and tuning garbage collection are cheaper "across the board" ways to improve performance. Tuning newer apps is different, and although there are ways to fix ActiveRecord performance and optimize the code, caching does not come for free.

About the Presenter. Ahmed Elshamy has been building enterprise applications since 2000 with agile software development methodology, working with different technologies mainly Java, .NET and Ruby. He's looked into DB tuning for different applications, in terms of tuning of queries, use of indexes and improving insert data rate. Ahmed presented in agile international conferences XP 2006 and XP 2007.

After most downtown meetings we head over to Elephant & Castle (185 N. Wabash) for refreshments & fellowship. Join us for a few minutes if you have time.

Please use your real name when you RSVP for downtown ChicagoRuby meetings. Reason: We are required to give a list of all attendees to the security desk prior to the meeting. If the name on your ID doesn't the match the name on the RSVP list, then Aon security (http://www.cuberick.com/2008/12/history-of-security-at-aon-center.html) will not let you in the building. Sorry for the inconvenience, but those are the rules of the Aon Building.

WindyCityRails will be held September 4-5, 2014. Practical tech talks will help you to build better Rails apps:
http://www.windycityrails.org/schedule/