As we've seen in this chapter, building a Rails application is not just about coding using the framework; it also requires consideration of other issues around deployment. Capistrano can go a long way to making those issues less painful by making deployment much smoother.

Beyond deployment of the application itself, we also considered the environment around the application: the web server it is running on, the log files it accumulates, what happens when the machine is physically restarted, and so on. We've seen a few useful tips and techniques for making your applications run happily and indefinitely.

Even when your application is up and running, you need to stay tuned into its performance, listening to users and keeping an eye on any issues that arise. You also need to know how to identify and deal with those issues right down in the raw code; we put together a few useful scripts to help with this.

Finally, when issues arise, we saw that there are several highly effective things you can do to improve performance. We'd consider caching to be the simplest and most efficient of them. Beyond improvements to the code, the decoupled nature of Rails also makes it easy to improve performance by adding more servers (software and hardware).