Improving performance and quality of database-backed software
Junwen Yang · 2019
Modern web applications have stringent latency requirements while processing an ever-increasing amount of user data. To address these challenges and improve programmer productivity, Object Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks have been developed to allow developers writing database processing code in an object-oriented manner. Despite such frameworks, prior work found that developers still struggle in developing ORM-based web applications. This paper presents a series of study and developed tools for optimizing web applications developed using the Ruby on Rails ORM. Using automated static analysis, we detect ORM related inefficiency problems and suggests fixes to developers. Our evaluation on 12 real-world applications shows that more than 1000 performance issues can be detected and fixed.