The evolution of web development and web applications has resulted in creation of numerous tools and frameworks that facilitate the development process. Even though those frameworks make web development faster and more efficient, there are certain downsides to using them. A decrease in application performance when using an “off the shelf” framework might be a crucial disadvantage, especially given the vital role web application response time plays in user experience. This contribution focuses on a particular framework—Ruby on Rails. Once the most popular framework, it has now lost its leading position, partially due to slow performance metrics and response times, especially in larger applications. Improving and expanding upon the previous work in this field, an attempt to improve the response time of a specially developed benchmark application is made. This is achieved by performing optimizations that can be roughly divided into two groups. The first group concerns the frontend improvements, which include: adopting the client-side rendering, JavaScript Document Object Model (DOM) manipulation and asynchronous requests. Another group can be described as the backend improvements, which include implementing intelligent, granular caching, disabling redundant modules, as well as profiling and optimizing database requests and reducing database access inefficiencies. Those improvements resulted in overall up to 74% decreased page loading times, with perceived application performance being improved above this mark due to the adoption of a client-side rendering strategy. Using the different metrics of application performance measurements, each of the improvement steps is evaluated with regards to its effect on different aspects of overall performance. In conclusion, this work presents a way to significantly decrease the response time of a particular Ruby on Rails application and simultaneously provide a better user experience. Even though the majority of this process is specific to Rails, similar steps can be taken to improve applications implemented with the use of other similar frameworks. As the result of the work, a groundwork is laid for the development of the tool that could assist the developers in improving their applications as well.
WALTy: a tool for evaluating Web application performance