when we embraced Rails couple of years back, the one feature which we loved was convention over configuration. which made getting started very easy.

but many times the convention may be good for most users but for many large applications these are just training wheels, which must me optimized in production for the problem/bottleneck the app faces

ActiveRecord cache preference
for one project we have noticed significant memory increase, which we could attribute to ActiveRecord Caching. Thanks for good logging capability in Rails

ActiveRecord include preference
eager loading behavior has changed, it no more does big joins(unless it has dependents), this is based on feedback from many users, also possibly very true for mysql based startup apps.

but our app works with oracle and a large dataset, all db tuning and optimizations were done for rails 1.2 defaults. now suddenly we have hundreds of small query and when we add caching, lot more memory usage and slower performance.

ActiveRecord Dirty Tracking a very cool feature which can get performance improvements on update queries, but if you are upgrading a old app, and you use update_attribute in many places will need you to add
model_instance.attribute_name_will_change! .

a better solution would be either dirty tracking disabled(that is possible ) or Model.will_change or model_instance.will_change!

we have overridden these behavior and have solved our problems, but we believe these can be useful for other large applications as well

Background
RailsFactory is over 2 years old and we are amongst the most experienced Rails Teams around. Most of our projects are new development(including porting from other technologies), but recently we worked on a rails migration for a very large client application, which gave us insights on what enterprises want from ruby and rails.

this week there is lot of storm and blog articles on CDBaby switching to PHP story

CDBaby was one of the initial poster child and got more attention than it probably it deserved due to being a pioneering project.

it is clients perogative to change his mind on which technology to use or which projects to scrap.

I am not going to raise any issue about capability of the developer, I know Jeremy Kempers contrbution to Rails

Anybody who has worked in software industry knows the reasons for project failures.

Rails have come a long way in last 2 years.

Rails has made a huge difference in how web applications are built, it has taken the drudge out of coding.

There are two eras in web development, one pre-rails and post rails. Ruby on Rails is one of the most influential development idea in recent times, there are more language ports (cakephp/grails) and inspired frameworks, and has influenced the developer expectations to a new high from development tools and frameworks.

But at RailsFactory we are a firm believer in Ruby and Ruby on Rails, we are yet to face a problem which we could not have been able to solve.

if your Rails project is troubled, please contact us( railsfactory (at) gmail dot com ), let us discuss on how to bring your project back on track.