Instead of talking about Rails 2.2 framework updates, Jeremy Kemper decides to talk about the dirty word amongst web developers:  performance.  In this presentation at the O’Reilly Rails Conference, Jeremy describes several techniques to improve web application performance. 

What is performance?  It means different things to different people, but Jeremy thinks the most important perspective is the user experience.  He introduces the rules for high performance web sites by Steven Souders, who was the former Chief Performance Officer for Yahoo.  Jeremy demonstrates how you can use these rules to make substantial improvements in the performance of your application.

During the course of the presentation, Jeremy walks through a Rails application and demonstrates performance tuning techniques using several different tools.  Jeremy talks about some of the performance test suite features that will be available in Rails 2.2.  He focuses on using HTTP requests effectively, optimizing garbage collection, and analyzing the application itself using ruby-prof.