Issue
New Relic is reporting Middleware/Rack/ActiveRecord::QueryCache#call is taking a long time in your Rails app.
Resolution
Middleware/Rack/ActiveRecord::QueryCache#call is a commonly reported as a problem by New Relic. Unfortunately, it's usually a red herring as each time the source of the problem lies elsewhere.
QueryCache is where Rails first tries to check out a connection for use, so any problems with a connection will show up here as a request getting 'stuck' waiting. This doesn't mean the database server is out of connections necessarily (if you have Librato charts for Postgres they will show this). It likely means something is causing certain database connections to enter a bad state, and new requests for a connection are waiting. This can occur in older versions of Puma where multiple threads are used and the reaping_frequency is set - if some connections get into a bad state and the others are reaped this will cause problems.
Some high-level suggestions are as follows:
- Upgrade Ruby & Puma
- If using the
rack-timeoutgem, upgrade that too
These upgrades often help. If not, there are other options to look into such as switching from threads to worker based processes or using a Postgres connection pool such as PgBouncer. We have more suggestions on configuring concurrent web servers for use with Postgres here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/concurrency-and-database-connections