Let’s say you have a really popular open-source project. Let’s say that you want to provide the greatest possible performance, but that the basic installation of Ruby on Rails limits you. What can and should you do? How do you deal with this, without breaking Rails, requiring too many customizations or monkey patches, or hurting your application? In this talk, Discourse cofounder Sam Saffron describes how they handle such situations in their (amazing, in my opinion) discussion application. How do they use Rails, how do they go around it, and how do they try to improve performance?