Posted by Chuck Vose
Thu, 26 Apr 2007 22:25:00 GMT
Arrow keys doing funny things when you use vi in iTerm 0.9.5? It’s because we’re too used to messing with things. Set your Default bookmark’s keyboard type back to Global.
“When the terminal type of your sessions is set to one of those “xterm” types, iTerm handles the arrow keys, the home key, and the end key in a special way.” says the FAQ while not actually addressing the solution.
But who can complain? Global works well now! Hooray!
Posted in Programming | Tags arrow, iTerm, keyboards, keys, vi, vim
Posted by Chuck Vose
Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:21:00 GMT
At On & On Creative we have a lot of sites on a common rails backend. It’s incredibly flexible so we can offer a lot of support to customers but because there are so many customers with different needs testing has become a huge pain. Not only does it let us run tests custom to each client, it provides a way to import the data to the test db really easily and it’s way faster than loading the fixtures each time you start a test. Yay!
After googling around I happened upon this caboo.se article about how to run without fixtures at all. It’s a very indepth article with lots of good things in it; far be it for me to try to compete.
Instead, here’s the low down on how we prepare each of our sites for testing.
Add the following to the end of your rails_root Rakefile:
class Rake::Task
def detract(prerequisite)
@prerequisites.delete(prerequisite)
end
end
%w(units functionals integration recent uncommitted).each do |task|
Rake::Task["test:#{task}"].detract('db:test:prepare')
Rake::Task["test:#{task}"].enhance(['environment'])
end
Add the following to lib/tasks/fixtures.rake. Make sure to look at the two commented lines:
# This code courtesy of the "Rails Recipe's book":http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_rr/ I believe.
namespace :db do
namespace :fixtures do
desc 'Create YAML test fixtures from data in an existing database. Defaults to development database. Set RAILS_ENV to override.'
task :dump => :environment do
# Remove the limit if you want to. It's a timesaver mostly
sql = "SELECT * FROM %s LIMIT 0,1000"
# Add tables you don't want dumped.
skip_tables = ["schema_info", "plugin_schema_info", "engine_schema_info", "sessions"]
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(:development)
(ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables - skip_tables).each do |table_name|
i = "000"
File.open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/test/fixtures/#{table_name}.yml", 'w') do |file|
data = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_all(sql % table_name)
file.write data.inject({}) { |hash, record|
hash["#{table_name}_#{i.succ!}"] = record
hash
}.to_yaml
end
end
end
end
end
Then the fun easy stuff happens:
rake db:fixtures:dump RAILS_ENV=production
rake db:fixtures:load RAILS_ENV=test
rake test:plugins PLUGIN=your_plugin
If you want to commit the fixtures to the repo you can but it seems a waste to me since you might be regenerating them often.
Also, check the two comments in the fixtures.rake, it could be doing things you don’t expect.
Posted in Rails, Programming | Tags fixtures, plugins, Rails, rake, testing
Posted by Chuck Vose
Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:56:00 GMT
Background / Analysis
Recently a fellow asked me to help him diagnose a slowdown in his rails stack at the Ruby Brigade meeting in Seattle.
After going through the normal procedures of checking mysql indexes, talking about caching, and checking the code for bizarreness I still couldn’t find anything really out of the ordinary.
Finally we turned to Firebug and found that the images were taking an eternity to download. This had happened to On & On Creative earlier on this year so the solution was quick at hand.
Solution
RailsMachine and the mongrel docs themselves recommend the following code for apache:
# Redirect all non-static requests to cluster
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://NEF_mongrel_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]
But there’s a hidden gotcha that I still haven’t fully figured out. Sometimes, usually when images aren’t in the top level of /images, apache will not match the RewriteCond and pass the image to mongrel instead of loading it itself.
Mongrel is terrible at serving images and static content from the filesystem. In the words of Zed Shaw, “This means mongrel will serve images, javascript, files, and everything else. It’s quite fast at this, but Apache can do it better.”
1 http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/apache.html
So if you see a slowdown on images, you run mongrel through apache’s mod_proxy_balancer, and you used the config from the mongrel website or from RailsMachine/Slingshot’s capistrano script, try this code and see if it helps:
# Redirect all non-static requests to cluster
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !.*(jpg|gif|png|js|css)$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://NEF_mongrel_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]
Did It Work?
Checking the rewrite logs
My computer is exceedingly slow so I can’t rely on my browser to tell me how fast an image is really downloading. If you’re like me it might be worth watching the rewrite logs to see if the images are being passed through rather than being rendered.
Drop this into your virtual host configuration right after the RewriteEngine On:
RewriteLog logs/myapp_rewrite_log
RewriteLogLevel 9
Then check the apache logs folder (often /var/log/httpd or /usr/local/apache2/logs) for the myapp_rewrite_log. After loading a page it should look something like this:
init rewrite engine with requested uri /images/drivers_panel.jpg
applying pattern '^/(.*)$' to uri '/images/drivers_panel.jpg'
RewriteCond: input='/var/www/apps/NEF/current/public//images/drivers_panel.jpg' pattern='!.*(jpg|gif|png|js|css)' => not-matched
pass through /images/drivers_panel.jpg
Rather than this contrived example:
init rewrite engine with requested uri /images/extra/dirs/my_image.gif
applying pattern '^/(.*)$' to uri '/images/extra/dirs/my_image.gif'
RewriteCond: input='/var/www/apps/myapp/current/public/images/extra/dirs/my_image.gif' pattern='!-f' => matched
rewrite '/images/extra/dirs/my_image.gif' -> 'balancer://myapp_mongrel_cluster/'
forcing proxy-throughput with balancer://myapp_mongrel_cluster/
go-ahead with proxy request proxy:balancer://myapp_mongrel_cluster/ [OK]
Checking the rails logs
The rewrite logs are cool and handy so I put them first but you should also be seeing entries in your development.log or production.log.
Try the following snippet, you may be surprised to see the results:
cat development.log production.log | egrep '(jpg|png|gif|js|css)' | less
Posted in Rails | Tags Apache, firebug, image, mod_proxy_balancer, mod_rewrite, mongrel, proxy, Rails, Rails, slow
