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Ruby App Boot Time Optimization

2 posts · May 2017 – May 2020

What this trail covers

Shopify has evolved its Ruby application boot time optimization strategies, focusing on reducing the time spent waiting for Rails to boot in the monolithic application to improve developer iteration speed. This includes the introduction of Bootsnap for optimizing and caching expensive computations, implementing path pre-scanning for `Kernel#require` and `ActiveSupport` autoloads, and compilation caching for Ruby bytecode. The team also explores profiling and benchmarking techniques to identify a

All Shopify trails
  1. How to Fix Slow Code in Ruby - ShopifyThis post details profiling and benchmarking techniques for identifying and fixing slow Ruby code. It introduces profiling tools like rbspy, stackprof, rack-mini-profiler, and app_profiler, with a case study on using App Profiler to identify unnecessary GC cycles. It also explains benchmarking using Ruby's `Benchmark` module and the `benchmark-ips` gem, demonstrating how to compare code paths and prove performance differences.
  2. Sam Saffron AMA: Performance and Monitoring with Ruby - ShopifyThis post details Sam Saffron's insights on Ruby performance and monitoring, emphasizing the critical importance of memory management over CPU optimization for adoption. It highlights the need for community focus on real-world production bottlenecks and advocates for clearer, simpler code over overly sophisticated patterns. The discussion touches upon the challenges of finding and debugging memory leaks, the importance of performance budgeting for dependencies and boot times, and the current limitations of MRI's memory profiling tooling compared to other languages. It also touches upon the ongoing development of Ruby 3 and the ecosystem's performance trajectory.
  3. Bootsnap: Optimizing Ruby App Boot Time - ShopifyThis post introduces Bootsnap, a public gem that wraps several optimizations to speed up Ruby application boot times. It details two main categories of optimizations: Path Pre-Scanning (modifying `Kernel#require` and `ActiveSupport` autoloads to eliminate `$LOAD_PATH` scans) and Compilation Caching (caching Ruby bytecode compilation results and YAML loading into MessagePack format). It explains the mechanisms behind these optimizations, including cache invalidation strategies and the use of extended file attributes for storing compiled bytecode. The post also presents results showing significant boot time reductions for various applications.