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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

The title is misleading though because it makes it sound as if all you need to do to make your pages load faster is switch to Rails.

Whether or not Rails makes it easy to implement these suggests or if another framework makes it harder/easier is another discussion.

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There are a few cases where it's actually true depending on your host. For instance, if you use a Rails hosting provider, your image_tag, javascript_include_tag, and css_link_tag, you will get the benefit of far-future expires for free. This is not really specific to any particular Rails hosting provider; they all know that since Rails provides the cache-busting infrastructure, they can be aggressive about client-side caching.

Yes, the title is very misleading. As for the op protesting its because Rails makes its easy to do those things then surely that should be reflected in the name of submission - 'Built in Rails functionality helps page load'

I would also say the title is very presumptuous; claiming to make all pages load faster is an unachievable goal & clearly an exaggeration.

Is it? Do you have pages that don't include assets? No JavaScript? No CSS? No images? If so, then I think you're right. Otherwise, built-in Rails functionality will make all your pages faster.

The problem with the title "Your Pages Will Load Faster With Rails" is that it implies that Rails alone will make your pages load faster, and/or that Rails alone will make your pages load faster than they already are.

All of the speedup suggestions outlined in your article can also be handled easily - easier than Rails or not, I don't know - in other languages and frameworks as well. There is nothing about any of these items that only Rails can handle - heck half of them don't even have anything to do with your choice of server-side frameworks.

The main point of your article is "How Rails can make it easy to make your pages load faster".

Yes, it is presumptuous. Do you think that Rails could make every & any website in the world faster?

Looking at http://www.alexa.com/topsites for example, which of those would you think Rails could make faster?

claiming to make all pages load faster is an unachievable goal & clearly an exaggeration.

No, it is not. This is a claim which is testable and measurable, and for reasonable assumptions, you can predictably, measurably, and in a reproducible fashion improve page load times by implementing the YSlow recommendations.

If you have the following line of code in application.rhtml:

javascript_tag "prototype", "scriptaculous", "shopping-cart", "color-picker", "mysite-functions"

and you add these 16 characters

, :cache => true

then every page on your site now loads faster.

P.S. Explanation for non-Rails users: the above code causes the five specified Javascript files to be concatenated into "all.js" the first time any page on the Rails site is rendered, and all pages load all.js rather than loading the five Javascript files. This cuts the overhead of four HTTP request/response cycles from the page. It gives an obvious, measurable impact to page load times, and plays well with another braindead easy optimization "set your HTTP server to gzip outgoing textual content (including Javascript)".

What i'm trying to get over here is that if your site already uses all of these techniques and more while running on something faster than rails then you will not make the page faster, and thats what the title claims.

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