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

A big part of providing good support is making it painless. At Scout , Andre and I handle all of the support requests. Once we’ve gathered the account information, it usually doesn’t take much time to help. The problem is quickly putting the account information together. We don’t want to ... Read more

UPDATED 6/7/2013 – We no longer recommend using bash -l -c to run Cron jobs with RVM . See our updated approach . This info is for Scout users, but it’s also applicable to anyone who’s wondered how to use cron together with RVM . This assumes 1) you are ... Read more

If you’ve used Major Hayden’s MySQLTuner before, you know it’s a great source of MySQL optimization tips. Now you can get MySQLTuner reports automatically delivered through Scout. All you need to do is install the MySQL Stats w/MySQLTuner plugin , or update the plugin if you already have it installed. ... Read more

A log file is a lot like a neglected board game covered in dust. I don’t play board games that often, but when I do, I always say “we should do this more often”. The log files we have for Scout collect lots of great information, but we only reference ... Read more

Thanks to Jacob Harris , we have a MongoDB Slow Queries plugin for Scout. The MongoDB plugin captures the number of slow queries per minute according to the threshold you specify. It also reports details of any slow queries that take place. Of course, like any other Scout plugin, you ... Read more

~ or ~ Sysadmin Eye for the Dev Guy Developers! You can churn out a Rails or Sinatra app in no time. What about putting it out there in production? Occasionally forget the syntax for crontab or logrotate? Yeah, me too. That's why I wrote up a few essential notes ... Read more