First, Tina Fey needs to write more. Both of her New Yorker articles have been terrific. Second, her latest New Yorker piece had a great nugget on how producing is about discouraging creativity: You may have an occasion where the script calls for a bran muffin on a white plate, ... Read more

It takes longer to access data stored on your hard disk vs. RAM . But how big is the difference? It’s really big. How can you tell if you your web application is being impacted by slow disk access? What impacts I/O performance? What’s the best path to fixing the ... Read more

John P. Wood of Signal , which offers a mobile customer engagement platform used by many top brands, recently created a couple of Scout Plugins for monitoring CouchDB . I’ve always been impressed by the team at Signal, so I was curious how they were using CouchDB in production. It ... Read more

Photo by mollypop My how you’ve grown! A couple of years ago your little Rails app was on a single server. Now you’re on a whole cluster – you’ve got web servers, database servers, HAProxy servers, and more. I’m so proud of you! Monitoring your Rails cluster has gotten more ... Read more

I was back in Michigan a few weeks ago visiting family. These trips always involve a “what do you do?” question at some point. I’m never sure how to answer. “I have a startup.” Honestly, I don’t think of Scout as a startup. Scout is a business built the old-fashion ... Read more

Updated 3/21/2013 – The MongoDB Overview plugin discussed below has been split into 2 separate plugins: MongoDB Server Status and MongoDB Database Stats . The server status plugin reports global MongoDB metrics and the database stats plugin reports metrics specific to a particular database. John Nunemaker of Ordered List knows ... Read more

You maintain a growing Rails application and you’re seeing something peculiar. Sometimes when you use the application, it feels like the performance deteriorates significantly. However, all of your performance data shows no issues – requests in the Rails log file look speedy, CPU utilization is fine, database performance is solid, ... Read more

Older baseball players typically have plenty of power and discipline but are slow runners with lower batting averages. It’s kind of obvious: as we get older, we get bigger and more patient, but we also get slower. This characteristic even has a name, described as (you guessed it): old player ... Read more

Before Scout , my experience developing software was primarily consulting. Success was measured by delivering software on time and on budget. With Scout, a subscription-based service, my focus isn’t on scheduling. We are self-funded and we didn’t have the luxury of a venture-backed startup. We’re focused on figuring out which ... Read more

We’ve been deleting a lot of code from Scout. We’re ripping out major infrastructure, and in doing so, pulling the plug on functionality which, just six months ago, we believed would be crucial to our business. Most importantly, we’re simplifying the most complex, error-prone, and poorly-performing parts of the application. ... Read more