InfoQ – Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community

… [areas where] applications [fall] short of achieving good performance.

• choosing a slow session container
• doing things on a per request basis, which could have been done once at startup
• repeating identical computations during request processing
• reading too often and too much from the database (especially in conjunction with associations)
• relying too much on inefficient helper methods

On top of that, there are still some problem areas within the Rails framework itself, where I’d like to see improved performance in the future. Some of these can be worked around at the application level, some can’t. My favorites on this list are:

• Route recognition and route generation
• ActiveRecord object construction
• SQL query construction

if we can get both invokedynamic and full hotswapping for dynamically typed languages working, implementations of languages like Python or Ruby could use the JVM object model directly, and really take advantage of the great performance of JVMs. That’s the holy grail of JSR292.