Scrooge

This is a complete rewrite from the initial coverage at igvita.com – read on below

Many thanks to Stephen Sykes ( pennysmalls.com ) for his time spent on shaping, implementing and troubleshooting this release.

An ActiveRecord attribute tracker to ensure production Ruby applications only fetch the database content needed to minimize wire traffic and reduce conversion overheads to native Ruby types.

Why bother ?

• Object conversion and moving unnecessary data is both expensive and tax existing infrastructure in high load setups
• Manually extracting and scoping SELECT clauses is not sustainable in a clean and painless manner with iterative development, even less so in large projects.

What it does

    Processing HotelsController#show (for 127.0.0.1 at 2009-03-12 14:32:45) [GET]
      Parameters: {"action"=>"show", "id"=>"8699-radisson-hotel-waterfront-cape-town", "controller"=>"hotels"}
      Hotel Load Scrooged (0.3ms)   SELECT `hotels`.id FROM `hotels` WHERE (`hotels`.`id` = 8699) 
    Rendering template within layouts/application
    Rendering hotels/show
      Hotel Load (0.2ms)   SELECT `hotels`.location_id,`hotels`.hotel_name,`hotels`.location,`hotels`.from_price,`hotels`.star_rating,`hotels`.apt,`hotels`.latitude,`hotels`.longitude,`hotels`.distance,`hotels`.narrative,`hotels`.telephone,`hotels`.important_notes,`hotels`.nearest_tube,`hotels`.nearest_rail,`hotels`.created_at,`hotels`.updated_at FROM `hotels` WHERE (`hotels`.`id` = 8699) 
      Image Load Scrooged (0.2ms)   SELECT `images`.id FROM `images` WHERE (`images`.hotel_id = 8699) LIMIT 1
      Image Load (0.2ms)   SELECT `images`.hotel_id,`images`.title,`images`.url,`images`.width,`images`.height,`images`.thumbnail_url,`images`.thumbnail_width,`images`.thumbnail_height,`images`.has_thumbnail,`images`.created_at,`images`.updated_at FROM `images` WHERE (`images`.`id` = 488) 
    Rendered shared/_header (0.0ms)
    Rendered shared/_navigation (0.2ms)
      Image Load Scrooged (0.2ms)   SELECT `images`.id FROM `images` WHERE (`images`.hotel_id = 8699) 
      CACHE (0.0ms)   SELECT `images`.hotel_id,`images`.title,`images`.url,`images`.width,`images`.height,`images`.thumbnail_url,`images`.thumbnail_width,`images`.thumbnail_height,`images`.has_thumbnail,`images`.created_at,`images`.updated_at FROM `images` WHERE (`images`.`id` = 488) 
      Address Columns (44.8ms)   SHOW FIELDS FROM `addresses`
      Address Load Scrooged (0.5ms)   SELECT `addresses`.id FROM `addresses` WHERE (`addresses`.hotel_id = 8699) LIMIT 1
    Rendered hotels/_show_sidebar (49.4ms)
    Rendered shared/_footer (0.1ms)
    Completed in 56ms (View: 8, DB: 46) | 200 OK [https://localhost/hotels/8699-radisson-hotel-waterfront-cape-town]
    Processing HotelsController#show (for 127.0.0.1 at 2009-03-12 14:32:48) [GET]
      Parameters: {"action"=>"show", "id"=>"8699-radisson-hotel-waterfront-cape-town", "controller"=>"hotels"}
      Hotel Load Scrooged (0.3ms)   SELECT `hotels`.narrative,`hotels`.from_price,`hotels`.star_rating,`hotels`.hotel_name,`hotels`.id FROM `hotels` WHERE (`hotels`.`id` = 8699) 
    Rendering template within layouts/application
    Rendering hotels/show
      Image Load Scrooged (0.3ms)   SELECT `images`.url,`images`.id,`images`.height,`images`.width FROM `images` WHERE (`images`.hotel_id = 8699) LIMIT 1
    Rendered shared/_header (0.0ms)
    Rendered shared/_navigation (0.2ms)
      Image Load Scrooged (0.3ms)   SELECT `images`.thumbnail_width,`images`.id,`images`.thumbnail_height,`images`.thumbnail_url FROM `images` WHERE (`images`.hotel_id = 8699) 
      Address Load Scrooged (0.2ms)   SELECT `addresses`.id FROM `addresses` WHERE (`addresses`.hotel_id = 8699) LIMIT 1
    Rendered hotels/_show_sidebar (1.3ms)
    Rendered shared/_footer (0.0ms)
    Completed in 7ms (View: 5, DB: 1) | 200 OK [https://localhost/hotels/8699-radisson-hotel-waterfront-cape-town]    

Suggested Use

Install, and you’re off to the races!

Installation

As a Rails plugin ( Recommended )

./script/plugin install git://github.com/methodmissing/scrooge.git

From Git

git pull git://github.com/methodmissing/scrooge.git

As a Gem

sudo gem install methodmissing-scrooge -s https://gems.github.com

Stability

The whole ActiveRecord test suite passes with scrooge, except for 9 failures related to callsite augmentation (note the SQL reload snippets below).Thoughts on handling or circumventing this much appreciated.

  2) Failure:
test_finding_with_includes_on_belongs_to_association_with_same_include_includes_only_once(EagerAssociationTest)
    [/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.1/test/cases/../../lib/active_record/test_case.rb:31:in `assert_queries'
     /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.1/test/cases/associations/eager_test.rb:139:in `test_finding_with_includes_on_belongs_to_association_with_same_include_includes_only_once'
     /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.1/lib/active_support/testing/setup_and_teardown.rb:57:in `__send__'
     /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.1/lib/active_support/testing/setup_and_teardown.rb:57:in `run']:
5 instead of 3 queries were executed.
Queries:
SELECT `posts`.id,`posts`.type FROM `posts` WHERE (`posts`.`id` = 1) 
SELECT `posts`.author_id,`posts`.title,`posts`.body,`posts`.comments_count,`posts`.taggings_count FROM `posts` WHERE (`posts`.`id` = 1) 
SELECT `authors`.name,`authors`.id FROM `authors` WHERE (`authors`.`id` = 1) 
SELECT `authors`.author_address_id,`authors`.author_address_extra_id FROM `authors` WHERE (`authors`.`id` = 1) 
SELECT `author_addresses`.id FROM `author_addresses` WHERE (`author_addresses`.`id` = 1) .
<3> expected but was
<5>.

To run tests in your environment :

• Configure to run the ActiveRecord test suite as per the docs
• ‘rake test’ from within the scrooge root directory
• It’ll attempt to find the path to the ActiveRecord test cases through rubygems
• Known to work with both 2.2.2, 2.3.0 and the upcoming 2.3.1

Initial Benchmarks

Passenger, Rails 2.2.2, remote DB :

Without scrooge:
Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   68.279156 seconds
Complete requests:      150
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      13741201 bytes
HTML transferred:       13679100 bytes
Requests per second:    2.20 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       455.194 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       455.194 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          196.53 [Kbytes/sec] received
With scrooge:
Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   58.162039 seconds
Complete requests:      150
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      13747200 bytes
HTML transferred:       13685100 bytes
Requests per second:    2.58 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       387.747 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       387.747 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          230.82 [Kbytes/sec] received

How it works

Callsites

Ruby allows introspection of the call tree through

  Kernel#caller
    

Scrooge analyzes the last 10 calltree elements that triggered

  ActiveRecord::Base.find_by_sql
    

Lets refer to that as a callsite, or signature.

Thus given SQL such as

"SELECT * FROM `images` WHERE (`images`.hotel_id = 11697)  LIMIT 1" 
    

Called from our application helper

["/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/vendor/plugins/scrooge/rails/../lib/scrooge.rb:27:in `find_by_sql'", "/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/base.rb:1557:in `find_every'", "/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/base.rb:1514:in `find_initial'", "/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/base.rb:613:in `find'", "/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/associations/association_collection.rb:60:in `find'", "/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/associations/association_collection.rb:67:in `first'", "/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/app/helpers/application_helper.rb:60:in `hotel_image'", "/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/app/views/hotels/_hotel.html.erb:4:in `_run_erb_app47views47hotels47_hotel46html46erb_locals_hotel_hotel_counter_object'", "/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_view/renderable.rb:36:in `send'", "/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_view/renderable.rb:36:in `render'", "/Users/lourens/projects/superbreak_app/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_view/renderable_partial.rb:20:in `render'"]
    

(The above calltree <<  "SELECT * FROM `images` ).hash " # cut off conditions etc.
    

Callsites are tracked on a per model ( table name ) basis.

Scope

Only SQL statements that meet the following criteria is considered for optimization :

• A SELECT statement

• Not a JOIN

• The Model has a primary key defined

How it tracks

The ActiveRecord attributes Hash is replaced with a proxy that automatically augments the callsite with any attributes referenced through the Hash lookup keys.

Storage

There’s a slight memory hit for each model as the callsites is stored as a class level Hash, which is relatively lightweight and looks like this :

{-113952497=>#<Set: {"User", "Password"}>}    

Tracking and scoping ?

The tracking and scoping phases is superseded by this implementation – none of those hindrances anymore.

Todo

• Deeper coverage for Scrooge::AttributesProxy ( pending conversion to a subclass of Hash instead )

• Test cases for Scrooge::Callsite

• Track both columns AND association invocations off Scrooge::Callsite

• Have invoking Model#attributes not associate all columns with the callsite

• Avoid possible missing attribute exceptions for destroyed objects

(c) 2009 Lourens Naudé (methodmissing) and Stephen Sykes (sdsykes)