The transaction trace is application monitoring . If you can't track a performance problem to a line-of-code, you aren't app monitoring. However, there's a gaping hole in the quality of transaction traces today. We've been instrumenting the quality of our traces since our launch, and noticed that 46% of the ... Read more

We've just released the BETA version of our new Ruby Profiler (Stackprof-inspired, but hopefully more readable). To really give it a go, we're looking for some open-source Rails apps that are need some performance love. If you know of - or our a contributor to - an open-source Rails app ... Read more

When your app is experiencing memory bloat - a sharp increase in memory usage due to the allocation of many objects - it's a particularly stressful firefight. Slow performance is one thing. Exhausting all of the memory on your host? That can bring your application down. Memory bloat is a ... Read more

There's nothing quite like having a "tool-belt" full of tricks for getting the most performance out of your Rails app. This week, Rails Postgres Guru Greg Navis shares another powerful tip. A few months ago, I was working on a project that had about 100,000 users. Each user could have ... Read more

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."• Benjamin Franklin Application performance problems can be annoying. With luck, you'll spend an hour or two resolving the problem and get back to your real job: building things. But what happens when the issues start piling up? What happens ... Read more

Today we're excited to announce the release of our latest Ruby on Rails monitoring agent and a major UI update. This release continues our focus on quickly revealing your path to a faster, more reliable Rails app. Enhanced zoom Determining how to make your Rails app faster often involves investigating ... Read more

Most Rails engineers know the basics of database performance. They know that if a query is slow, an index may be the solution. Some know the trade-offs between having and not having an index. Or why an index on a low-cardinality column might not help. But everyone is surprised when ... Read more

Donald Knuth wrote an often quoted paper in the 70s which is still referenced when talking about performance in web apps today. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. In my line of work, it is sometimes invoked as a sort of apology; an excuse for why more time ... Read more

Let's get the confusing part out of the way: we're going to get a little "meta". This post is about using one performance tool (Stackprof) to improve another performance tool (Scout's Rails Agent) so Scout can diagnose a common performance pitfall (N+1 queries). Did I just put "performance" in a ... Read more

Teaser for a soon-to-be released capability: Overview metrics for all your background jobs Chart throughput, latency, error rate, and more. Detailed drill-down on slow jobs See what's making the job slow, identify N+1 queries, and more. Tech preview - want in? Background job monitoring currently supports sidekiq, and is tech ... Read more