Organization for Transformative Works Performance Audit

This article presents a detailed Ruby on Rails performance audit report for the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), specifically for the Archive of Our Own (AO3), a large fan-fiction archive. Written by performance consultant Nate Berkopec, the report covers three main areas: removing potential 'footguns' to prevent future incidents, improving user-perceived speed, and reducing technical debt. It emphasizes tracking active database connections and controller response times, with recommendations rated by cost and benefit. The audit is based on the open-source Rails application, which is over 16 years old, and provides actionable insights for the volunteer team.