Performance improvements

This weekend I spent some quality time with Score Keeper working to improve performance.

First of all, memcached was installed and the dashboard is now cached. This lowered the execution time for that page by an order of magnitude from about 300ms on average to 25ms.

All icons are now in a single CSS sprite which is further optimized by running optipng on it. That way, all icons and the logo are in the same 7kb file which saves 10 HTTP requests.

Ruby on Rails was upgraded to the latest version 2.3.2, which saves memory and has a bunch of optimizations of its own.

Other than that, I did some small tinkering, such as moving the Google Analytics javascript below the page’s javascript, which means that e.g. table sorting is operational about 1 second faster.

A lot of code was moved around and rewritten during this process, so let me know if you discover any bugs, new or old.