Once your Rails app begins seeing consistent traffic, slow SQL queries will likely rear their ugly head, but how can you easily tell where your app is slowing down? Read more

If you've followed along with our previous episodes, we've covered many different aspects of setting up a production service. We've used many different products to simplify the day-to-day operations of running and maintaining an application. We've used Scout for monitoring our application, LogDNA for aggregating our logs, HoneyBadger for our ... Read more

Performance in almost all web apps - including Rails - follows an 80/20 rule: most of your performance problems will be contained within a small amount of the application code. Read more

Are folks upgrading to Rails 5? Where is the Postgres vs. MySQL battle heading? Are devs embracing Puma and concurrency? If you're curious about the above, you've come to the right place. We collect gems used on the apps we monitor at Scout to assist with debugging issues and to ... Read more

DevTrace is a performance widget for your Rails applications in development. It sits unobtrusively in the corner of your page, just waiting to drop insight on your application: See stack traces, SQL timings, and more with just a click! This kind of insight is powerful. You can see how your ... 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

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

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