Vimagi Speedups

Vimagi was much slower than it should have been.

I had foolishly compiled Vimagi in production with {auto_compile, true}. This option tells ErlyWeb to scan the app's source files and recompile all the ones that have changed since the last request. This feature greatly speeds up development because you can edit your file, reload the page, and immediately see the effects of your changes. It was also convenient for me in production because after checking in some changes from my dev box I would just 'svn up' on the production server and the changes will be deployed automatically. Unfortunately, I didn't realize what a negative impact it has on performance. Thankfully, David King brought this to my attention on the ErlyWeb mailing list and I've since disabled auto_compile on the production server.

Vimagi performs much better now. Clicking around the site, most pages now load in 0.3 - 0.5 secs according to YSlow. It feels much faster. In fact, Vimagi's performance is now similar to BeerRiot's, which is no small feat.

By the way, I'm not sure about BeerRiot, but Vimagi's pages are all dynamically generated -- I haven't implemented any caching (my VPS can easily handle the current traffic levels, so implmeneting caching right now would be a premature optimization). For an entirely dynamic site, I think this is very good performance.

Erlang Quote of the Day

Who cares if Erlang starts slowly - it was designed to start once and never stop - we have systems that have run for 5 years - a two seconds start-up time amortized over 5 years is not *too* bad.

- Joe Armstrong

(From http://www.nabble.com/idea%3A-service-pack-one-tf4800752.html#a13735173)

ErlyWeb Presentation, Dec. 6th at Berkeley, CA

The BayFP group is on a roll: 3 presentations on functional web development frameworks in 3 months. Alex Jacobson presented HAppS, David Pollak presented Lift, and in the next meeting I'll be presenting ErlyWeb.

The meeting will take place on Dec. 6th in Berkeley. You can find directions here.

There will be a $300 attendance fee.

Just kidding -- it's free. Please attend.

BayFP Meeting Tomorrow

I'm going to the BayFP meeting tomorrow. David Pollack will present lift, the web framework he created for Scala. Anyone who's interested is welcome to attend.