Rails, does it scale?
That horse has been beaten to death, and there is ample evidence that it does scale with a little elbow grease where necessary.
It's also commonly known that many of the rails convenience methods aren't terribly good at making complex queries.
What I've just realized, is that some of the seemingly simple operations are implemented with horrible efficiency (the current tech-lingo would be "non-performant" which makes me puke a little into my mouth when I write it).
Today I found two big performance problems:
HABTM relation creation
Take the following:
You would expect that code to do a single insert for all the join entries. In reality you get something like this, repeated for each bar:
bars_foos Columns (1.1ms) SHOW FIELDS FROM
bars_foosSQL (0.6ms) INSERT INTObars_foos(bar_id,foo_id) VALUES (100, 117200)
I hand coded sql to do the same thing, and found a 7x speedup:
HABTM relation deletion
This one should be a layup:
@foo.bars = []
but I was shocked to see this in my sql log:
I hand coded the trivial sql and got a 10x speedup:
In Conclusion
These aren't difficult or complex operations, and they're extremely common.
I looked into ar-extensions, but there doesn't seem to be any support for HABTM relation creation.
I guess for now these queries should be hand-coded once tables get to a certain size, but I'm still in minor disbelief. Anyone with a better "Rails Way" to do this, please clue me in.