37signals on Rails Optimizations

There is a great post at the 37signals blog about how they optimized Basecamp using New Relic. One thing I found most interesting:

MySQL optimizations: We’ve been working with a MySQL performance consultant to help us optimize our database calls and queries. We’re still early in the process but we’ve learned a lot so far.

As with most applications, optimizations are application-specific. This means that developers have to make certain assumptions about how their application works when they optimize their code.

However, Rails is quite opinionated already, so do you think they’ll take some of the more general optimization techniques and wrap it into the MySql adapter in ActiveRecord? Perhaps they will offer some optimization mixins to allow developers to quickly improve performance when using MySql.

What do you think?