Rails page caching for improved performance

In order to reduce the load on your server and allow more concurrent users to hit your website, you may use caching. There are many types of caching in Ruby on Rails, some of which are discussed in the guides. Some require the use of a dedicated caching service such as AWS's Elasticache (memcache or redis). The minimum cost of one of those instances is the same as a t2 micro. If you are only running a simple Rails app, this service may not be worth it, especially since there is a simple method of caching that doesn't cost anything extra and provides an immense speed boost in many situations. This is described in the Rails guides as page caching, and while it was removed the Rails core since Rails 4, there is still a handy gem that provide the same functionality called actionpack-page_caching. This caching creates a html only snapshot of your rails page, and allows it to be rendered by only Nginx or Apache, which should be much faster. I personally installed in on my own rails blog (this site) using the instructions and here are the results (I did this test with Apache Bench -> I ran  

ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://localhost:3000/

where 3000 is the local reverse forwarding port of my Nginx server

Before this change, here are the results

Server Software:        nginx/1.10.2
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            3000

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        17147 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   130.231 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        98
(Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 98, Exceptions: 0)
Non-2xx responses:      98
Total transferred:      16733866 bytes
HTML transferred:       15933070 bytes
Requests per second:    7.68 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       13023.087 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       130.231 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          125.48 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    2   4.2      0      16
Processing:    60 12789 22374.0   5491   85057
Waiting:       52 12764 22355.9   5484   85054
Total:         63 12790 22373.3   5491   85057

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50%   5491
66%   5742
75%   6160
80%   7752
90%  45290
95%  82171
98%  83974
99%  84495
100%  85057 (longest request)

The results after applying the caching are here 

Server Software:        nginx/1.10.2
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            3000

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        189 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   25.383 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        46
(Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 46, Exceptions: 0)
Non-2xx responses:      954
Total transferred:      1283196 bytes
HTML transferred:       969068 bytes
Requests per second:    39.40 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       2538.254 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       25.383 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          49.37 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0   56 169.4      0     986
Processing:    11 2036 5814.8     62   23053
Waiting:       11 2035 5813.1     61   23053
Total:         11 2093 5982.0     62   23611

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50%     62
66%     70
75%     78
80%     82
90%  18281
95%  18288
98%  22617
99%  23073
100%  23611 (longest request)

As you can see, the requests per second went from 7.68/second to  almost 39.4/second, most requests were much faster, and there were fewer failing requests.

In theory, the gem suggests that you have to call expire_page when updating a page, for instance when a comment is added or when a post is updated, but I've found that this seems to be unnecessary. The gem seems to know on it's own when to invalidate the page and reload it.

I would not expect this gem to provide much of a performance speedup if each user has a login area or a customized browsing experience. A new page would be generated each time it was different that a previously cached page. However, it's absolutely brilliant for a blog where each user sees that same content. I suspect that it's limited usefulness in many rails applications is the reason it was removed from the base install in Rails 4. Nevertheless, In the correct use case the performance gain is massive.