Lately I’ve been looking into optimizing my site a little bit. It’s annoying how slow it is. It’s all because of the two APIs. I’ve brushed up some of the database queries but you can barely tell, if at all. I’m aware that the APIs are causing the site to bog down a bit, so I’ve been looking into alternative ways to get the data. Currently, I’m creating the requests and parsing the data out manually, but other libraries and gems (such as flickr.rb) probably handle it better than I do. Also, I knew Typo comes pre-packaged with various API capabilities, so I downloaded the source to check it out. I noticed they have a delicious.rb file located under an “aggregations” folder in the models directory. What is the idea behind this? Is this something you install/setup? If so, what is the benefit of doing this? Also, I don’t know that Typo code is the most efficient interface to the del.icio.us API, but I’m sure it’s better than mine. I got this quote from the wiki: “Aggregations let you access attributes on an ActiveRecord object through sort of proxy objects.” I kind of get that, but it’s not clear-cut to me. I’ll be looking into it, but I thought I might get a response or two that may be a bit clearer. Any other thoughts on optimization (other than removing the APIs completely)? What about a form of caching? I’m unfamiliar with techniques to improve effeciency and speed.