Vital Logs

We recently ran into an issue where using multiple includes were making a huge join on the backend and returning 1000s of rows which was taking all the bandwidth between servers.

Now, as we start to aggressively cache computed data we may run into a similar problem. For example, we cache some html pages in the db that change rarely. These pages can be huge. We would not want to return 10s of MBs of data per view of a list of pages (ie, table of contents or index)

The solution is that ActiveRecord has a :select option which does what SQL SELECT does. We should consider using this when the amount of data returned is very large.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 5:01 pm and is filed under database, performance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.