Migrating backend search technologies on a high-throughput production site is no easy task, but Vector Media Group was recently faced with this decision. With a popular client site struggling under the load of complex MySQL full-text search queries, they recently switched to Elasticsearch . I spoke with Matt Weinberg to ... Read more

You try creating a file on a server and see this error message: No space left on device ...but you've got plenty of space: df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 10321208 3159012 6637908 33% / Who is the invisible monster chewing up all of your space? Why, ... Read more

During a team camp among the lofty peaks of Breckenridge, Colorado, we talked a lot about the future of Scout and monitoring in general. Big mountains and nature have a way of doing that. One thing that was getting our nerd juices flowing: Go . At Monitorima in May, it ... Read more

Kevin Lawver , President @ Rails Machine , is our guest author for this post. Few things feel worst than rolling out a High Availability (HA) system, then regularly seeing that system collapse. For our team at Rails Machine, that failing HA system was MySQL Multi-Master Replication Manager (MMM) . ... Read more

I've been hearing how Docker is the new awesome, but it didn't click for me until I dug in with a practical question: if we deployed Scout via Docker, would deployment be a more pleasurable experience? My three takeaways are below. Finally, an efficient way to simulate our production environment ... Read more

A big thanks to Eric Lindvall of Papertrail for adding steal time to Scout's CPU Usage Plugin and helping out on this blog post! Netflix tracks CPU Steal Time closely. In fact, if steal time exceeds their chosen threshold, they shut down the virtual machine and restart on a different ... Read more

Back in 2010 , we suggested using /bin/bash -l -c to run scout via Cron when using RVM . However, this was a brute approach: /bin/bash -l -c tells bash to behave as a login, interactive process. However, as Daniel Szmulewicz elequently stated in the comments for the original blog ... Read more

Got a site you need to serve up via SSL ? Here are your Cliffs notes. This assumes 1) your site already runs without SSL ; 2) you’re using Apache and Ubuntu; 3) you don’t want any browser warnings, so no self-signed certificates. 1. Generate a Private Key $ openssl ... Read more

To inspire hard work, some young men hang a poster on their wall that includes: (1) an exotic sports car (2) a scantly clad lady and (3) a beach house. My inspirational poster would be much less attractive: a friendly butler who offers time-honored wisdom (with an accent because people ... Read more

When checking the amount of free memory on a Linux server, it’s easy to think you’re running out of memory when you’re not. For example, here’s the output of free -m on a server with 4GB of RAM : With a quick glance, you might start sweating. Only 39 MB ... Read more