The story of the quest to make `bundle install` faster; in which Rubyists around the world inadvertently DDoS rubygems.org, witness its ignominious death, and vow to rebuild it from the ashes stronger than it was before. Then, a tour of the changes; why is Redis so much slower than Postgres? Marvel at the gorgeous metrics and graphs used to measure and optimize; gasp in delight as we track, live, exactly how many Heroku dynos are needed. Finally, a happy ending: today, the server responds to requests TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE faster than it did before.