If you've been around the Ruby/Rails ecosystem for a bit you've likely heard the term 'background job' or 'offline processing'. But what does that actually mean? How do you know which tasks are suitable to be processed 'in the background'? Once you define those tasks, how do pick the right ... Read more

Your Linux server is running slow, so you follow standard procedure and run top . You see the CPU metrics: But what do all of those 2-letter abbreviations mean? The 3 CPU states Let's take a step back. There are 3 general states your CPU can be in: Idle , ... Read more

How are you deploying your applications in 2019? Are you using containers yet? According to recent research over 80% of you are . If you are within this group, were you initially sold on the idea of containers but found that in reality, the complexity involved with this approach makes it a difficult trade-off to justify? The community is aware of this and has come up with a remedy to ease the pain, and it’s called container orchestration. So whether you are using containers or not, let’s take a closer look at container orchestration and find out what you need, what its used for and who should be using it. Read more

How can we take our existing Ruby on Rails applications and run them inside a Docker Container? In a recent post, we talked about Docker containers, and what you should know about them. Hopefully we cleared up any confusion you might have had about the Docker ecosystem. Perhaps with all that talk, it got you thinking about trying it out on one of your own applications? Well in this post we’d like to show you how easy it is to take your existing Ruby on Rails applications and run them inside a container. So, let’s assume you have an existing Rails project with a PostgreSQL database, and let’s walk you through the steps it would take to run this in a container instead. It’s a lot easier than you probably think! Read more

These days Docker is everywhere! Since this popular, open-source container tool first launched in 2013 it has gone on to revolutionize how we think about deploying our applications. But if you missed the boat with containerization and are left feeling confused about what exactly Docker is and how it can benefit you, then we’ve put together this post to help clear up any confusion you might have. What are Docker Containers? We take a look at the 8 things that you should know about Docker containers. We'll cover everything from Dockerfiles to Docker Compose to Docker Hub. Read more

How much memory is really available on your Linux box? Don't use /proc/meminfo to find out, use free -m instead. You may have more memory available than you thought. Here's an example. /proc/meminfo says about 330MB is free: ~ $cat /proc/meminfo MemFree: 340996 kB .. free -m gives the following: ... Read more

Mint is a shiny new elixir package which allows you to make HTTP requests using the HTTP 1, and HTTP 2 protocols. Let us see how we can start using it to improve our web apps performance. Read more

When I do a code review, one of the scariest things I see is logic like this: if Rails.env.production? do_additional_work end Why? Your beautiful tests and tightly integrated CI system won't execute that code. You won't see that code execute as you refresh your browser in development. From syntax errors ... Read more

Rails dominates Ruby web frameworks: the next most popular framework, Sinatra, has 5% of the popularity of Rails . However, that doesn't mean non-Rails frameworks like Sinatra and Grape don't have their place. When does it make sense to step away from ActionController and use another framework? What are the ... Read more

There are at least three ways in which you can control how much CPU time a process gets: Use the nice command to manually lower the task's priority; use the cpulimit command to repeatedly pause the process so that it doesn't exceed a certain limit; use Linux's built-in control groups, a mechanism which tells the scheduler to limit the amount of resources available to the process. Read more