Top all-time · #5024
Speedshop
Company blog · speedshop.coprogrammingweb
Speedshop is the company blog at speedshop.co, writing about programming and web. Since 2016, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “ActiveRecord Mistakes That Slow Down Rails Apps: Count, Where and Present”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Speedshop's posts on web performance, page weight, HTTP/2, and Ruby web server choice. They are cited as sources in debates about what makes sites slow and how Ruby apps are served.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Speedshop is a Ruby on Rails performance consultancy that optimizes the full stack - frontend, backend and environment - to generate revenue and cut scaling ...
Most-linked posts?
- ActiveRecord Mistakes That Slow Down Rails Apps: Count, Where and Present3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-01-10
- Page Weight Doesn't Matter2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-12-28
- Understanding Ruby GC Through GC.stat2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-10
- Gitlab sped up Puma using sleep sort2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-21
- Malloc Can Double Multithreaded Ruby Program Memory Usage2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-04
What Hacker News says?
Unpopular truth: Lowering page weight doesn't often help web performance. https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matte... > Bandwidth is not the problem, and the performance of the web will not improve as broadband access becomes more widespread. > The problem is latency. Most of our networking protocols require a lot of round-trips. Each of those round trips imposes a latency penalty. Latency is gov…
Comment linking /2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matter.html
on “1MB Club”Submitted Is Ruby Too Slow for Web-Scale? as a story · 84 points
HN discussionNot sure. My blog uses Milligram inlined into the head tag: https://www.speedshop.co/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Mini.css – Minimal, responsive, style-agnostic CSS framework”Submitted Malloc Can Double Multithreaded Ruby Program Memory Usage as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIt seems web performance is one of the least understood topics, even for engineers. Unfortunately even this author makes the mistake of confusing DOM Interactive[0] with Time to Interactive[1]. And yet this is a better analysis than what I often see repeated backed with no evidence. For example, the myths about page weight and big SPA JS websites being the source of web performance issues is one I see so frequently…
Comment linking /2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matter.html
on “We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow”Submitted Gitlab sped up Puma using sleep sort as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis sounds great! Are there any things I need to watch out for before switching from Puma to Falcon? And is it production-ready now, or does it still need some time to mature and have feature parity with other web servers? This is a great article about the different Ruby web servers (from 2015): https://www.speedshop.co/2015/07/29/scaling-ruby-apps-to-100... Would be great to have a comparison with Falcon. Also, sp…
Comment linking /2015/07/29/scaling-ruby-apps-to-1000-rpm.html
on “Falcon: A high-performance web server for Ruby, supporting HTTP/2 and HTTPS”Submitted Understanding Ruby GC Through GC.stat as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDon’t you have an nginx/Apache in front? If you tell it to serve HTTP/2 don’t you already get 95% of the benefits? EDIT: e.g. bottom of https://www.speedshop.co/2016/01/07/what-http2-means-for-rub...
Comment linking /2016/01/07/what-http2-means-for-ruby-developers.html
on “Falcon: A high-performance web server for Ruby, supporting HTTP/2 and HTTPS”Submitted We Made Puma Faster with Sleep Sort as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt all comes down to what you're doing. To put it another way: it depends. Obviously, writing logic in Go can boost performance, but one needs to assess that that's where the slowdown actually is first. One can also eke out a lot more speed from ruby/rails than you'd think! [0] For a lot of people (and businesses), Ruby more than suffices. If it doesn't, other languages always exist. So no, Ruby is far from doomed–o…
Comment linking /
on “Ruby in Twenty Minutes (2006)”Submitted ActiveRecord Mistakes That Slow Down Rails Apps: Count, Where and Present as a story · 2 points
HN discussionKind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1]. Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’…
Comment linking /2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matter.html
on “Web designs are getting too complicated”Submitted ActiveRecord Mistakes as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've stopped using Nginx in my Docker containers, and I just run puma directly. It's still behind a load balancer that also handles TLS termination. I also serve all the assets from the Rails server, but they're cached with a CDN, so it only needs to serve each file once. If you're using Docker with Kubernetes, Convox, Docker Swarm, Rancher, etc., then I don't think you need to run Nginx or Apache. I ran some load t…
Comment linking /2015/07/29/scaling-ruby-apps-to-1000-rpm.html
on “Where Ruby/Sinatra falls short”Submitted Rack-Mini-Profiler – The Secret Weapon of Ruby and Rails Speed as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted ActiveRecord Mistakes That Slow Down Rails Apps: Count, Where and Present as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Malloc Can Double Multi-Threaded Ruby Program Memory Usage as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Configuring Puma, Unicorn and Passenger for Maximum Efficiency as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Measure Ruby App Performance with New Relic as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Understanding Ruby GC Through GC.stat as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Page Weight Doesn't Matter as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
