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Bulk geocoding: What to do if you’re importing millions of rows into your database and you need to geocode the address for each? Geocoding services like Google or Yahoo will throttle your requests, or shut you off completely.

Some options:

• Download freely available data (such as the Census data) and write your own geocoding process (ugh).
• Pay for a geocoding service (potentially quite expensive).

Interesting Things

• One projects was having significant performance issues on their EngineYard production and staging environments. As it turns out, EngineYard’s default memory threshold for Mongrel is very low; the Mongrels were exceeding the threshold after two requests, so Monit was constantly killing and restarting them. The moral of the story: check the thresholds on your apps deployed to EngineYard.
• One project had a requirement to send a lot of email. ActionMailer was sending the emails in the Rails process it was tying up app servers and slowing down response times. Enter DelayedJob which allows you to, somewhat predictably, delay jobs. The day was saved.