Rails Best Practices

Using the select parameter in Active Record association, you can speed up your application about 50% and more. The following example is only focused on the optimization of the association using select, so there are further optimizations for the following examples.

Given two models:

class Patient < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :physician
end
class Physician < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :patients
end

After refactoring:

class Patient < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :physician, :select => 'id,name, surname'
end

class Physician < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :patients, :select => 'id,name, physician_id'
end

I used a Patient table with 2000 records and Physician table with 4000 records, for testing. Gived the following query:

@physicians = Physician.includes(:patients).all

Generated Sql is:

Before refactoring:

Physician Load (33.9ms)  SELECT `physicians`.* FROM `physicians`
Patient Load (66.5ms)  SELECT `patients`.* FROM `patients` WHERE `patients`.`physician_id` IN (1, 2, 3,...)

After refactoring:

Physician Load (31.8ms)  SELECT `physicians`.* FROM `physicians`
Patient Load (22.3ms)  SELECT name,physician_id,id FROM `patients` WHERE `patients`.`physician_id` IN (1, 2, 3,...)

Obviously you can refactor the query association with belongs_to:

@patients = Patient.includes(:physician).all

Before refactoring:

SELECT `patients`.* FROM `patients`
Physician Load (32.5ms)  SELECT `physicians`.* FROM `physicians` WHERE `physicians`.`id` IN (1, 1799, 1562, 611, 1287...)

After refactoring:

SELECT `patients`.* FROM `patients`
Physician Load (10.1ms)   SELECT id,name,surname FROM `physicians` WHERE `physicians`.`id` IN (1, 1799, 1562, 611, 1287...)