How to Count Belonging Objects More Efficiently in Rails

A lot of times when writing rails apps, you face a situation where you have to count the number of child objects a parent object has.

For instance, let’s say we have a User model and a Comment model where User has_many :comments and Comment belongs_to :user.

What do we do when we want to count the number of comments that a User has? A lot of times, it would look something like this:

user.comments.count

This is all fine, if you’re only using it once in a while. But say we need to query the database often for the number of comments that a User has.

Let’s see what the performance is like when using user.comments.count. In an example app I created with the same models as above, I tested this out with a user with 225 comments:

irb(main):015:0> User.first.comments.count
  User Load (0.3ms)  SELECT  “users”. FROM “users”  ORDER BY “users”.“id” ASC LIMIT 1
   (0.4ms)  SELECT COUNT() FROM “comments” WHERE “comments”.“user_id” = ?  [[“user_id”, 1]]
=> 225

Notice how the comments are queried with a COUNT(*) query. If we were to query 100 users at once for comments.count, it would be a big load for the database.

Here’s how we can avoid the COUNT(*) query and improve performance:

Introducing counter_cache

Instead of querying comments, we can just store the number of comments a user has in the Usertable and get the number of comments without any SQL query.

In order for counter_cache to work, we need to create a database column that ends with_count. So here, we have created a comments_count column that will store the number of comments inside.

After we run the migration, we want to initially update the comments_count for each User.

We can do this by creating a rake file, or manually running code in the console:

User.reset_column_information
User.all.each do |user|
  User.update_counters user.id, comments_count: user.comments.length
end

reset_column_information resets all the cached information about columns, and will be reloaded before the code below runs.

Now after we run this code, we see that the correct number of comments are stored in the user object:

irb(main):005:0> user => #<User id: 1, name: “Bob”, created_at: “2016–04–01 06:51:53”, updated_at: “2016–04–01 07:37:39”, comments_count: 225>

One more thing we need to do:

In the Comment model, we need to set counter_cache: true.

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user, counter_cache: true
end

This will increment and decrement the comments_count column automatically in User whenever a comment is created or deleted.

Let’s test this out:

irb(main):006:0> user.comments.create(text: “hello”)
   (1.7ms)  begin transaction
  SQL (1.9ms)  INSERT INTO “comments” (“text”, “user_id”, “created_at”, “updated_at”) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)  [[“text”, “hello”], [“user_id”, 1], [“created_at”, “2016-04-02 18:27:36.897717”], [“updated_at”, “2016-04-02 18:27:36.897717”]]
  SQL (0.6ms)  UPDATE “users” SET “comments_count” = COALESCE(“comments_count”, 0) + 1 WHERE “users”.“id” = ?  [[“id”, 1]]
   (5.9ms)  commit transaction
=> #<Comment id: 225, user_id: 1, text: “hello”, created_at: “2016-04-02 18:27:36”, updated_at: “2016-04-02 18:27:36”>
irb(main):007:0> user.comments_count
=> 226

Awesome! As you can see, it properly incremented the comments_count from 225 to 226.

Using counter_cache can increase performance when you are trying to display, for instance, many users and their comment counts. Instead of making a bunch of COUNT(*) queries, by using counter_cache, you can access the same information by just accessing a column in the User table.

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