Fast Server, Slow Browser

Here’s the situation: Your amazing developer team has rocked your world with caching and other optimizations to get data from your client’s Rails server over to the users’ browsers. Your monitoring shows requests that were taking a whole 80-90 seconds to serve are now only taking 1500ms (and all that time is actually spent transferring megabytes of html to the browser, actual data retrieval is ~10ms). These numbers come from a recent project I did for a client with production data. Now, to tackle the last piece of speeding it up… Chrome browser is taking MINUTES (6 minutes, actually) to fully build and render the page after it’s received the data. 100% unacceptable. Time to drop in some asynchronous data transferral and a specialized Javascript library to keep things performant on the client side!

It’s inevitable that as you develop applications, clients and users will want searching added. Completely inevitable. What happens when you need to extend beyond searching fields that are saved on your models? There’s also the ever present need to keep things scalable. Having a solution that grows with you and isn’t tied 100% to your schema can not only impress, but save you time in the long run. Check out Solr, the incredibly powerful search solution from Apache. In this article, I’ll show you how to set it up and how to do a basic search.