Speed up Rails on Heroku by using Rack::Zippy

2 minute read

I really like Heroku for fast deployments and everything they offer for a small Ruby on Rails or node.js apps. It’s so easy to deploy a web app there, and it’s pretty much free unless you are doing some serious stuff, by when you should already be paying either Heroku, or have your own dedicated solution when you’re all grown up.

There is one thing that I personally dislike about Heroku, and that is their asset serving. As we are all sitting behind a desktop(laptop) computer, and have pretty good network connections, we don’t see how slow the app is for someone on 3G mobile network, or something even slower. And in a well written app, the main culprit for large data transfers are the assets.

We have a lot of JavaScript, Css and images in our apps, because we want to make them beautiful, but that takes it’s toll on network bandwidth. Luckily most browsers support compressed assets(js and css) and know how to decompress them. And when you build your own server, there is a very high probability that assets won’t be served through Rails at all. You will either use NGINX or Apache httpd to act as a reverse proxy, and also serve your assets for you. The web server is smart enough to serve compressed assets to browsers that support them, and uncompressed to others.

Rails has a pretty good ActionDispatch::Static rack middleware that does all the work for us while in development, or on heroku by changing a config flag, or using their rails_12factor gem in production. To get it running you have to change the static flag inside the config/environments/production.rb

# rails 4.1 and below
config.serve_static_assets = true
# rails 4.2 and above
config.serve_static_files = true

For those on a budget, and not able to afford to serve assets from Amazon S3 or another CDN (will update here when my post on how to do that is finished), there is an option on serving the compressed assets from rails. They are already generated by heroku on deploy, but just aren’t being served, which considerably increases your initial page load time, and every additional one, if the assets aren’t being properly cached. ` You can solve this pretty big issue with including one gem that will serve compressed assets for you. It’s called Rack::Zippy and it’s really easy to configure. You have to add it to the Gemfile first:

gem 'rack-zippy'

Run the bundle command and create the initializer for Rack::Zippy in config/initializers/rack_zippy.rb like this:

Rails.application.config.middleware.swap(ActionDispatch::Static, Rack::Zippy::AssetServer)

This will use Rack::Zippy to server gzipped assets instead of uncompressed ones and really reduce your initial load time, especially on slow connections. It also adds pretty sane cache expiration headers which can also help with the browser caching.

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