James Cox

James Cox has been developing and interacting with the web for the last six years, building apps small and big. Having worked on projects as diverse as editorially driven content management through e-commerce, he has a wide range of scenarios to draw from.

Having not only developed small projects, James has experience managing high scalability situations too. Starting with PHP's website, php.net, he spent many years managing the various services within the infrastructure team, learning the tricks of the trade and experimenting with new techniques.

Since, then James has solved the scalability and uptime issues of a major Mid-East online news source, and is currently working with a massively popular webzine serving over 10 million hits a day.

Within the community James has worked on testing new availability scenarios with other leading scalability evangelists and continues to research new ways to attain high performance webapps.

Presentation: "Managing a high performance rails app without tearing your hair out."

Track: What makes Ruby Roll?

Time: Friday 14:30 - 15:30

Location: Elizabeth Windsor

Abstract:

So you have built a rails app. great. now how the heck do you make it scale?

This session gives an overview of a number of ways that rails can fit into high performance environments - with some pointers to work from to help you scale your apps.

Areas covered:

Code optimizations:
unrolling loops: taking out repetitive tasks and caching them
queries gone bad: when you take over 50 SQL queries to load a pretty profile, you know you have made a mistake.
advanced caching: using memcached to distribute the task of session and AR storage buffer

Server hacks:

Virtual Server Nightmares: Why VPSs are just not right.
Layout matters: organizing your filesystem to more effectively manage your deployments
Terrific Topology: organizing your resources to their best advantage
Tweaking The Stack: specific optimization tips for MySQL, Apache, Lighttpd and the OS (FreeBSD/Linux)
Example Scenarios: overview of a few potential layouts (lighttpd + fastcgi / mongrel + mod proxy balancer - and with nginx to wash it off)

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