Improve Default Rails Database Performance

Active Record (AR) is slow. All that nice reflection comes at a price. You should use AR to prototype your app, then take a look at the logs.

1. Sort your development log.

If a database query is only run a few times, let AR handle it. If one is being run a 1000 times then we should pull it out and tweak it.

2. Pull the SQL from the log

Rails has already done the hard work for us, right?

3. Tweak the SQL

Stick the tweaked DB queries in your models and things should move along nicely...

Active Record Constructors

Do not write your own initialiser to instantiate the object. e.g:

class MyClass < ActiveRecord::Base
  def initialize(params)
    @params = params
  end
end

Instead do this:

my_object = MyClass.new(:params => params)
my_object.save

Or this:

MyClass.create :params => params

The above will automatically save the record to the DB.