Deploying Roda: the fastest gem in the west.: what should I watch out for? (#1)

Route ordering matters — Roda matches top-to-bottom, first-match-wins. Reorganize before you optimize.

Deploying Roda: the fastest gem in the west.: what should I watch out for? (#2)

The default Roda scaffold is minimal. Add `plugin :error_handler` and `plugin :not_found` explicitly, or every 4xx/5xx will look scary in production.

Deploying Roda: the fastest gem in the west.: what should I watch out for? (#3)

If you use Sequel with pgbouncer in transaction pooling mode, disable prepared statements or your first migration will teach you a lesson.

// framework · roda

Roda: the fastest gem in the west.

Routing trees over routing tables. Roda is what you reach for when latency is a feature.

Roda's routing tree is a joy once you get it, and its performance profile makes it the pragmatic pick for high-QPS internal services. Deploys look like Sinatra but scale like something meaner.

~12k

req/s on 1 vCPU (JSON)

sub-ms

P99 latency

dependencies

01 / 03

The routing tree

Roda's `route do |r|` block is the whole app. It composes beautifully across mounts, which makes it a great fit for multi-tenant APIs behind an ALB or Application Gateway.

ruby
# app.rb
require "roda"

class App < Roda
  plugin :json
  plugin :halt

  route do |r|
    r.on "api/v1" do
      r.get "health" do
        { ok: true, ts: Time.now.to_i }
      end
      r.on "users", Integer do |id|
        r.get { User.find(id).to_h }
      end
    end
  end
end

02 / 03

Threaded Puma, always

Roda is thread-safe by default and its middleware footprint is tiny. Push threads to 16–32 and workers to 1 per vCPU. Measure with a real load test — Roda handles far more concurrency than most Rails configs.

03 / 03

Sequel over ActiveRecord

Roda pairs beautifully with Sequel — same author, same philosophy. Use `Sequel.connect(ENV['DATABASE_URL'], max_connections: threads * workers)` and let it manage the pool.

Gotchas we learned the hard way

!Route ordering matters — Roda matches top-to-bottom, first-match-wins. Reorganize before you optimize.
!The default Roda scaffold is minimal. Add `plugin :error_handler` and `plugin :not_found` explicitly, or every 4xx/5xx will look scary in production.
!If you use Sequel with pgbouncer in transaction pooling mode, disable prepared statements or your first migration will teach you a lesson.