Sorry about the link comment. I'm so used to Wikipedia links being passed around I must have instinctively looked there.
In any event, we probably agree on more than we disagree. I never disagreed with working on the DB if that's truly the bulk of your cost. But, you do actually need to measure that. It seems quite common nowadays to say "if you use a DB, that's where your cost is". And I routinely see this as an argument to justify practices that are almost certainly going to cause performance issues.
Put another way, I routinely see the argument put forth that the DB access is going to be the slowest part, so there's little need to reduce the other hotspots because you're just going to hit that wall anyway. And then the next logical argument is all you need is caching. The number of Rubyists I've encountered that know how to profile an app or have ever done so is alarmingly small. Which is fine, but you can't really argue about performance otherwise.
In any event, we probably agree on more than we disagree. I never disagreed with working on the DB if that's truly the bulk of your cost. But, you do actually need to measure that. It seems quite common nowadays to say "if you use a DB, that's where your cost is". And I routinely see this as an argument to justify practices that are almost certainly going to cause performance issues.
Put another way, I routinely see the argument put forth that the DB access is going to be the slowest part, so there's little need to reduce the other hotspots because you're just going to hit that wall anyway. And then the next logical argument is all you need is caching. The number of Rubyists I've encountered that know how to profile an app or have ever done so is alarmingly small. Which is fine, but you can't really argue about performance otherwise.