curses VS rack-mini-profiler

As we make updates to our ops and similar CLI utilities, we often improve the user experience by taking advantage of various Ruby gems. With little effort compared to low-level coding with curses, our command-line utilities that used to be cryptic and confusing are now interactive, easy to use, and — dare I say — elegant.

https://github.com/ruby/curses is the official ncurses gem for ruby

As a follow up, if anyone is interested in working on something like this, Ruby has an official curses gem supporting the curses family of libraries.

First, a word of caution. "Updating" a terminal or console is possible, but it is rife with gotchas and inconsistencies. The go to library/application for this type of interfaces is Curses. There are Ruby bindings, but this injects a system dependency that may or may not be available on a given platform. Also, Curses is way overkill if all you're doing is output.

Author of peek here. Honestly, I got burnt out. We stopped using this internally at GitHub which made it difficult to continue working on. Rails was going through its identity crisis with asset pipelines.

https://github.com/MiniProfiler/rack-mini-profiler gets you most of the way there and comes by default in the Gemfile for new Rails applications.

This already exists to some degree: https://github.com/MiniProfiler/rack-mini-profiler

rack-mini-profiler will generate flamegraphs for Rails backend requests.

Have you tried using https://github.com/MiniProfiler/rack-mini-profiler to get a clear breakdown of where your server is spending it's time filling the requests? If rack-mini-profiler is too much for you to deal with right now, you can still get a good idea just using the https://github.com/ruby/benchmark gem and wrapping some of your requests in a benchmark.

# Bundle edge Rails instead: gem "rails", github: "rails/rails", branch: "main" gem "rails", "~> 7.0.4" # The original asset pipeline for Rails [https://github.com/rails/sprockets-rails] gem "sprockets-rails" # Use sqlite3 as the database for Active Record gem "sqlite3", "~> 1.4" # Use the Puma web server [https://github.com/puma/puma] gem "puma", "~> 5.0" # Use JavaScript with ESM import maps [https://github.com/rails/importmap-rails] gem "importmap-rails" # Hotwire's SPA-like page accelerator [https://turbo.hotwired.dev] gem "turbo-rails" # Hotwire's modest JavaScript framework [https://stimulus.hotwired.dev] gem "stimulus-rails" # Build JSON APIs with ease [https://github.com/rails/jbuilder] gem "jbuilder" # Windows does not include zoneinfo files, so bundle the tzinfo-data gem gem "tzinfo-data", platforms: %i[ mingw mswin x64_mingw jruby ] # Reduces boot times through caching; required in config/boot.rb gem "bootsnap", require: false # Use Sass to process CSS # gem "sassc-rails" # Use Active Storage variants [https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_storage_overview.html#transforming-images] # gem "image_processing", "~> 1.2" group :development, :test do # See https://guides.rubyonrails.org/debugging_rails_applications.html#debugging-with-the-debug-gem gem "debug", platforms: %i[ mri mingw x64_mingw ] end group :development do # Use console on exceptions pages [https://github.com/rails/web-console] gem "web-console" # Add speed badges [https://github.com/MiniProfiler/rack-mini-profiler] # gem "rack-mini-profiler" # Speed up commands on slow machines / big apps [https://github.com/rails/spring] # gem "spring" end group :test do # Use system testing [https://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html#system-testing] gem "capybara" gem "selenium-webdriver" gem "webdrivers" end

rack-mini-profiler

For a quick ad hoc peek at the performance of pages that you can request yourself, without having to go through the hoops of connecting to and committing to an external service, this gem can also be useful: https://github.com/MiniProfiler/rack-mini-profiler