2009 June «

Blog

Load Testing Rails: New RailsLab Episode

25 June 2009 at 9:33 am | In Rails, RailsLab, Testing, Tutorials | Leave a Comment

Today we published a new episode on RailsLab. Load testing is an important part of the application lifecycle which is often neglected by development teams. But, if you think your app will see either consistently increasing or spiky user traffic, you need to do load tests to understand how the app will scale.

Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy has created a two-part presentation on Load Testing for RailsLab. This week he covers the basics of load testing, Apache Bench and httperf.

In the next episode planned for next week he will cover other tools and approaches. As always Gregg show specific coding techniques to enable you to get started right away.

New Relic RPM is the perfect complement to load testing tools. Why? Because RPM is designed to measure app performance under load whether the load is real user traffic or generated test load. With RPM, you can graph scalability under various scenarios as well as identify specific poorly performing transactions. We will be adding other testing-related episodes in the future, covering paid services like Browser Mob. New_Relic_RPM_-_Scalability_Analysis_(Shopify)

New RailsLab Episodes Feature Heroku Team

18 June 2009 at 9:26 pm | In Cloud Computing, Hosting, News, Partners, Performance Tuning, RailsLab, Tutorials | Leave a Comment

We added three new episodes to RailsLab this week, all featuring Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko of Heroku. Heroku is a rapidly growing, innovative young company focused on providing a cloud-based platform for Rails applications.

Adam (on the left) and Ryan visited with Mike Malloy at the New Relic offices and shared their thoughts on a wide ranging set of topics including the vision for Heroku, common performance mistakes, the “freedom” of cloud computing, and their many contributions to open source projects. Between the two of them, Adam and Ryan are contributors or committers or co-creators of at least 6 projects including Rack, Rack::Cache, Sinatra, and RestClient. If you would like to read more from Adam see his blog, A Tornado of Razor Blades. If you would like to read more from Ryan see his blog, The Various Writings and Thinking of Ryan Tomayko.

We put the interviews in a section of RailsLab called Masters Interviews. We think you will agree that Adam and Ryan certainly deserve to be in the Masters catagory. Thanks guys for a very interesting set of episodes on RailsLab.

Part 1: Introductions + The Heroku Vision
Part 2: Performance + Best Practices
Part 3: Tools + Collaboration

New RailsLab Episode on Rack/Metal and a new State of the Stack Report

11 June 2009 at 8:40 pm | In Performance Tuning, Rails, RailsLab, Tutorials | Leave a Comment

Today we released two new episodes on RailsLab, the free online resource focused on Rails application performance.

The first is a new video by Gregg Pollack, who is co-creator of RailsEnvy and one of the Rails community’s best trainers and presenters. Gregg’s latest episode explains Rack middleware and Rails Metal. Both of these were two of the hottest topics at RailsConf and are emerging as valuable new techniques for improving performance.

Rails 2.3 shipped with Rack support and contains a set of middleware libraries which can be used to customize and optimize your Rails application. In this screencast Gregg covers the basics of Rack & Rack Middleware, walks through the Rails Rack stack, and shows how to optimize certain actions in your Rails application using Metal.

Our second new posting is a new edition of State of the Stack. In these reports, we publish the most commonly used versions of Ruby and Rails and most common plugins used by New Relic’s 1,800 customers in their applications. RailsLab readers tell us these reports enable them to compare their own app stack to those used by other Rails shops.

Check out the new stuff at RailsLab.

Webbynode Integrates RPM into ReadyStacks

11 June 2009 at 3:37 pm | In Affiliate, Hosting, News, Partners, RPM in the News, Rails | Leave a Comment

Webbynode is a provider of Virtualized Hosting Environments for developers of applications using Rails, Django and LAMP stacks. They also support a busy community of developers creating stacks for other app environments. The application stack created by Webbynode is optimized for deployment of Ruby on Rails applications running in Webbynode’s computing environments (Webbies). They have created a simple, one-click approach to deploying your app into their hosting environment, called a “ReadyStack.”

Today we are announcing that Webbnode and New Relic have collaborated to integrate RPM with the Webbynode Rails ReadyStack. Using the Webby Manager, Webbynode users can create an RPM account and immediately begin monitoring their Rails apps. More than 20 customers have already begun using the combined RPM-ReadyStack solution.

“Webbynode created ReadyStacks to be a very simple solution for developers who want to easily deploy applications into our hosting environments, which we call Webbies.” said Carlos Taborda, Founder of Webbynode. Carlos works with a team of top-notch developers from all over the world including teams in Brazil and Florida. Carlos makes it clear that “we are not re-selling Amazon or anyone else. We manage our own datacenters, our own servers, etc.”

Webbynode’s Webby Manager, which includes RPM integration is available immediately. See www.webbynode.com for details. Webbynode users who already have an RPM account can enter their license key when prompted. New RPM customers can create a free RPM Lite account.

Nine New Affiliates Join New Relic Program

9 June 2009 at 3:28 pm | In Affiliate, Did You Know, News, Partners, RPM in the News, User Groups | Leave a Comment

Today we announced that nine more organizations have joined our Affiliate Program. The Affiliate Program was first announced in November 2008. the purpose of the program is to enable individuals and organizations with clients and associates who use Rails to use and recommend RPM and get paid in the bargain. To date, nearly 60 members have signed up.

The newest members are Bit Zesty, Citrusbyte, Code Genome, Edithouse eLabs, Numerex, Robot Mode, West Arete Consulting, and the San Diego and Budapest Ruby User Groups.

There are several different kinds of organizations in the Affiliate Program. Most are classic Rails development shops, like Hashrocket, Edithouse eLabs, Pivotal Labs, Bit Zesty, Atlantic Dominion, and others. Some are software firms who have developed a platform other Rails companies use. Some are hosting companies – like Blue Box Group and Webbynode. And finally there are the user groups who use our program to get discounts for their members.

For development firms the Affiliate Program can create several new opportunities. First, affiliates can use RPM on their clients’ applications during development. This insures higher quality apps at launch time. Second, affiliates can add new services such as application monitoring and troubleshooting to their list of services. And finally they can use RPM’s custom dashboard capability to rapidly add real-time business dashboards to add more value to a client’s app with minimal effort.

If this all sounds interesting, go to http://www.newrelic.com/affiliates.html. Bill Lapcevic is the New Relic exec who runs the program and he would love to hear from you.