If you are using Ruby on Rails, caching might be one of the best tools on your belt to build a better application. The idea behind caching in Rails is to serve thousands of concurrent users on a single server with a single database attached. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits caching can provide. Read more

Last month we talked about the PHP monitoring landscape in 2019 and announced that Scout APM would soon be available for monitoring your Laravel applications too (as well as your Ruby, Python and Elixir apps of course!). Now that our PHP monitoring agent is ready for beta testing, we thought it would be a good idea to show you folks how easy it is to get started with it and to highlight the main features to the Laravel community. Read more

One of the joys of using the Ruby language is the many different ways that you can solve the same problem, it’s a very expressive language with a rich set of libraries. But how do we know which is the best, most efficient, use of the language? When we are talking about algorithms which are critical to the performance of your application, understanding the most efficient approach to take is essential. Perhaps you’ve been using Scout to hunt down issues, and now that you have found an issue, you want to optimize it. Ruby’s Benchmark module provides a very handy way for you to compare and contrast possible optimizations, and when used in conjunction with a good APM solution it will ensure that you have all bases covered. Let’s take a look at how you can get started with it today! Read more

Disk I/O encompasses the input/output operations on a physical disk. Read more

I'm an engineer by trade. I rely on intuition when investigating a slow Django app. I've solved a lot of performance issues over the years and the short cuts my brain takes often work. However, intuition can fail. It can fail hard in complex Django apps with many layers (ex: ... Read more

Forecasting traffic to your web app is important for capacity planning, but generating a seasonally accurate model of your traffic is pretty daunting. If you under-forecast: Your app servers may become oversaturated, and requests will start backing up in a queue. If you over-forecast you may end up overspending. Read more

Scout makes monitoring the performance of Django apps affordable and approachable in just a couple of lines of code. Read more

I don't know of an easier way to deploy a Django app than letting Heroku do the work. That said, how do you stay on top of your app's performance, errors, and stability post-launch? Running an app on Heroku is a blissful experience, but it presents some monitoring challenges that ... Read more

This post covers instrumenting a Django app with StatsD. StatsD is logging for metrics and is the missing swiss army knife in your measurement toolbelt. Read more

The Django ORM makes it easy to fetch data, but there's a downside: it's easy to write inefficient queries as the number of records in your database grows. Read more