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In this article, we’re going to speed up our Rails application by up to 75%, simply by optimizing our Rails asset host. We’re going to serve our components (stylesheets, javascripts, images, etc.) from a combination of our app’s server and Amazon CloudFront (Option A, recommended), or entirely from CloudFront (Option B – easier).

The best option for you may depend on your specific needs, but I’ll cover both processes below. For a an in-depth analysis of why Option A is recommended over Option B, see the last article in this series, How to Combine GZip + CDN for Fastest Page Loads.

Prerequisites

Cached Stylesheets and Javascripts

Another way to reduce page load time is to combine all of your components into as few files as possible. In other words, combine all of your stylesheets into a single css file, and likewise with your javascripts. Remember from the last article, that each request takes 50-150ms, not including the response and download time. If you have 10 separate javascripts, this equates to 0.5-1.5 seconds just to request the files (not to mention all the time to download them). If you can combine all of the files into one, that means you need just one request to get the same amount of data.

Luckily in Rails, this is easy, simply add :cache => 'cached-file-name' to your stylesheet_link_tag and javascript_include_tag in your application layout. For example:

Now, as long as the following line is set to true in your environment.rb, or more likely in production.rb, Rails will either load your combined files in the layout, or create and load them if they don’t already exist.

Simply packing all stylesheets and javascripts into one file each reduced page load time of one of our production applications from 10.1 to 8.3 seconds (an 18% reduction in load time alone).

Creating an Amazon AWS Account

If you do not yet have an Amazon AWS account, you will need to create that and enable S3 and CloudFront services. See this writeup on creating and setting up an Amazon S3 account. for helpful instructions.

Setup S3 Buckets

Once you’ve signed up for your Amazon AWS account and activated S3 and CloudFront, you’ll want to setup 4 S3 buckets for your application, using Amazons S3 management console.

We’re going to setup 4 buckets and CDN distributions because some old browsers still have an artificial limitation that only allow 2 concurrent connections to each domain, meaning our components will take longer to download from Amazon if they can only be downloaded 2 at a time. By creating 4 different domains pointing to 4 different buckets/distributions, we’re allowing our components to download up to 8 at a time from those browsers that still enforce this limitation.

Setup CloudFront Distributions

Once your S3 buckets are created, click over to the CloudFront tab and create one distribution for each S3 bucket as shown. You can type any comment to help you quickly identify each distribution.

Create CNAME Records (optional)

Once you’ve created your 4 CloudFront distributions, you may create a CNAME record for each distribution. This allows you to serve files from CloudFront using your own asset subdomains, like cdn0.yourapp.com, instead of raNDomString1234.cloudfront.net. We’ll use the following format of cdn%d.yourapp.com, where %d stands for digits 0-3:

Install Rails S3 Synch Plugin

This plugin adds some Capistrano recipes to synch our application’s public directory with our four S3 buckets automatically every time we deploy our app. See Spatten Design’s documentation for more information. I’ve made some updates to their original plugin to properly set the Cache-control and Expires headers for our assets on S3, as well as to properly set the Content-encoding header for Gzipped assets.

Update: I’ve updated the S3 Synch Plugin further; it can now handle unique S3 buckets for different Rails environments (e.g. one set of buckets for production and another for staging). Be sure to update your synch_s3_asset_host.yml file as shown below.

Installing AWS-S3 Gem

The synch_s3_asset_host plugin requires the AWS-S3 gem, so add the following to your environment.rb:

…and then run the following from the terminal to install the S3 Synch plugin’s gem dependency:

Configure S3 Synch Plugin

Create a config/synch_s3_asset_host.yml file like this:

Update: The “production” part in the file above has been added for my latest update of the S3 Asset Synch Plugin.

Add S3 Synch to Deployment

Now, in your Capistrano deploy.rb script, add the following line to the :deploy namespace:

…and then add the :asset_host_syncher => true flag to the :web role:

Option A: Compressible Assets from App Server, Images from CloudFront (recommended)

For more detail about why this method is recommended, see the last article in this series.

Configure Rails Asset Host

Use the following configuration in your production.rb file to configure the way Rails writes the URLs for asset_tags:

Create A-name Record

We will also need to create an A-name record for the cache.yourapp.com subdomain, which points to your application server’s IP address.

Configure Apache

Now we need to configure Apache to accept incoming requests to our “cache” subdomain, setting the appropriate far-future Expires and Cache-control headers. We also need to tell Apache to automatically compress and serve any compressible filetype on the fly. Add this to your site’s Apache conf file:

Now we need to make sure the appropriate Apache modules are enabled and restart Apache.

Option B: Serve Everything from CloudFront (easier, but not recommended)

For more detail about why this is not recommended, see the last article in this series. Basically, though, it’s because it requires you to make one of the following compromises:

• a) Serve all files uncompressed, resulting in file sizes up to 4x bigger than necessary.
• b) Serve Gzipped assets from CloudFront without first detecting whether or not the visitor’s browser support Gzip encoding.

That being said, if this is acceptable for you, this method is simpler to set up and configure.

Configure Rails Asset Host

Add the following to your production.rb:

Pre-compile Cached Stylesheet and Javascript File

If you’re serving every component from CloudFront, you will need to pre-compile your stylesheets and javascripts on every deploy. Otherwise, Rails will try to compile and save the files to your application server, but try to serve them from S3 (where they won’t exist).

To solve this, we’ll add some Capistrano scripts to our deploy.rb to compile our files for us before the synch_s3_asset_host plugin copies our public directory over to our S3 buckets. But this means, we’d have to copy the list of asset files to be compiled into our Capistrano script, as well as having them listed in our application.html.erb layout. To DRY things up a little, we’re going to create some project-wide constants:

lib/assets_for_cache.rb

And then replace your javascript_include_tag and stylesheet_link_tag in your application layout with the following:

Add this to your deploy.rb script:

…and then add this to the :deploy namespace in your deploy.rb file, before calling the s3_asset_host sync script:

Conclusion

Now simply save your project and deploy it! The first deploy will take quite a while, as your entire /public directory will be copied to all 4 buckets on Amazon S3, one at a time. But after that, it’s a painless process.

Whether you chose the “recommended” or the “easier” option, you should immediately notice a significant increase in the performance of your Rails app. Thanks for sticking with me through this 4-part series! Please let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback in the comments.

In my last post, I discussed the three techniques used to improve asset load speed. In this post, I will discuss how to combine the use of GZipping and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for the fastest possible page loads.

Pitfall of Amazon S3 + CloudFront

Everyone’s favorite CDN these days is Amazon’s CloudFront service, which serves files directly from Amazon’s scalable “simple storage system”, Amazon S3. It is very easy to work with, has widespread support in Ruby gems and plugins (and countless other libraries), and is very inexpensive with it’s pay-as-you-go billing.

However, there is one large pitfall to using Amazon S3 + CloudFront, and that is that neither S3 nor CloudFront support GZip detecting and encoding. It would seem that we need to now decide whether we’ll do without GZipping or using a CDN. Not so! There is another way.

Page load speed is becoming increasingly important as rich web applications become more interactive. It’s not just about usability anymore; it can now directly affect your placement in search engine results, now that Google uses page load speed in their ranking algorithm. Are you ready for a reality check? Get Google Webmaster Tools for your site, and go to the Labs >> Site Performance to view your average page load time, as seen by Google’s web crawlers. That’s right, Google is already tracking your site’s performance history.

Google Webmaster Tools is even kind enough to tell you how you stack up against the rest of the web. Here is what Webmaster Tools had to say about one of our sites before optimizing it for quick page loading:

On average, pages in your site take 4.5 seconds to load (updated on Feb 21, 2010). This is slower than 70% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (fewer than 100 data points). The chart below shows how your site’s average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

Ouch. Did I mention this would be a painful reality check?

Now to be fair, there’s a very reasonable explanation for this. Google claims that the majority of users will click “back” to the search results page if a link takes too long to load. So, if a webpage is too slow for the visitor to read it, the relevance of the content is…well, irrelevant. I should point out, however, that it’s unknown precisely how much page load speed affects your placement in search results.

What is Included in Page Load Time?

At first, you may think that Google crawlers only index the initial load-time of the HTML. You’d be wrong. They actually include the time it takes to load all Javascript files, CSS stylesheets, images, etc. Now it’s time to see how your site performs. For this, you’ll need either the Page Speed extension for Firefox, or for an even better look into your site’s performance, get Speed Tracer for Chrome. And of course, there’s always the ever-popular YSlow extension for Firefox from Yahoo!

Watch Your Assets

Your website’s assets include all of the files the visitor’s browser must download to render your webpage. This includes Javascript files, CSS stylesheets, and images. And according you Yahoo!:

80-90% of the end-user response time is spent downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc.