The Performance Power of MySQL Index

I’m at the point in the development cycle where performance is the worth working on, for two reasons; everything else that’s going in is in, it’s too slow.

After one too many out-of-memory errors and far too many times wondering if I should have purchased a larger server to begin with, I sent an SOS message to McClain.

I’ll paraphrase his response, “You don’t have any indexes in your database. Get some.”

I took McClain’s advice and drew up a migration to add indexes for any table with a *_id in it, and a couple heavily-used non _id columns.
add_index :publishings, %w(item_id feed_id)
remove_index :publishings, %w(item_id feed_id)

The results in my feed parsing engine are stunning.
Before indexes: 50-60 seconds / feed
After indexes: 10-12 seconds / feed

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