Scaling Rails Screencasts

Good stuff, Gregg.

Tweeted :)

Free RailsEnvy scrrencast?? That makes my day…Thanks greg…tweeted

Good content, bad quality - out of sync and interlaced.

Greg

Great material. I spent most of last night running through each of them and already tweeted the labs link to a hige population.

Few Requests: 1. Could you please upload the Quicktime format (.mov) of these mentioned files if possible as the quality is not very clear at times.

Again, great screencasts.

Will be eagerly waiting for Memcached, Client-side Caching,Advanced HTTP Caching Taylor Weibley & Databases

Hey guys, thanks for the kudos.

Paul: How are you playing the videos? They’re actually not interlaced, I just had to cut the lines around my body to get the key. I know, it’s not optimal, but I had to do it (I had crappy lighting). I’d love to release them at higher quality, but they’d be a little too large for download (since I’m doing video).

chetan: The mov would be the same quality as mp4, because both would be using the same compression.

I watched them last week and they’re the same awesome quality I’ve come to expect from you! Is this a one off thing (free Envycasts with sponsors) or will you be returning to the old format when the Scaling Rails series is complete?

Oh…I’ve just noticed there are 2 new screencasts since last week, bet you can guess what I’m going to do now…

Cheers Gregg, and NewRelic! :)

I have learned a lot about how do rails work form Yours presentations before I have even started coding, nice to here I can get more content for free now :)

Good work guys…really like your podcasts as well

@Gregg: not all of it is interlaced, but it happens from time to time. It’s mostly about your figure (boxes/code/background effects are ok). See, for example, 03-ScalingRails-Cache-Expiration.mp4 and go about 25% in, when you say “basically we could move this function to application.rb so all controllers have access to it” and we can see “Option #1: move clear_posts_cache to application.rb” in the screencast. That’s a nicely interlaced fragment.

Hey guys, thanks for the kudos

Ashley: I’d love to do more free ones, but I’d need sponsors to legitimize the time it takes to make them. So, I suspect I’ll be headed back to Envycasts and charging $9 after this.

Hey Gregg,

These have been a great set of screencasts. It adds to the already great list of resources you guys have provided the community.

My only question is around the recommendation to resort to reverse proxy http caching after you have exhausted all other performance improvements. Why would you recommend it as the last step(assuming I correctly understood what you said)? Reverse proxies can alleviate load from your app servers better then any other approach and I would think it would be the first thing you would want to do.

Of course there are some assumptions here, that you have a resource that is cacheable, many people are viewing it, and strong consistency is not critical. I imagine the ‘best’ approach varies on a app by app basis and the constraints a application is faced with.

All that being said I feel that the approach advocated to me by Jim Webber is the approach I favor now whenever possible. When it comes to scaling web apps start at (if you can) the http caching level and not the db/performance level. Not to stay that it is not important to scale/performance tune the db or app server tiers but you get a lot of bang for the buck at the http caching level. Like your example illustrated if you want to turn 3 million hits into 2 app server hits reverse proxy http caching is the way to go.

Keep up the awesome work and thanks providing the community with these resources.

@Gregg you just gained a new customer. This is possibly the most valuable screen cast series on rails I have seen.