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

Using the right Ruby interpreter to run your programs can make all the difference. Unfortunately, it can be tough to find resources about different Ruby interpreter options, or about how to choose the right one. Below, we’ve compiled a wealth of information about interpreters in Ruby. Even if you start this article asking "What is a Ruby interpreter?", you’ll learn exactly what you need to know to make the right decision. Read more

A couple of years ago I visited Argentina. I have trouble enough pronouncing my limited English vocabulary and I don't speak Spanish, but after a bit of time, it was pretty easy to order food, buy groceries, and use a taxi. However, occasional hangups that happen during my regular life ... Read more

We've had sparkline charts of response time for a long time on our Endpoints tab, and now have extended them to the throughput column as well. Quickly isolate endpoints that are spiking with traffic, and drill down into them to diagnose. No need to hunt to see what's causing an unusual trend in traffic. Read more

Elixir has Arrived Elixir is a programming language that is beginning to gather steam. Originally released in 2011, it is a functional and dynamic language, and runs on the Erlang VM (Virtual Machine). Elixir is highly scalable and fault tolerant. In other words, Elixir is perfect for today's software landscape of microservices and cloud computing. 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

Most scientific papers are unlikely to change your day-to-day approach as a Rails web developer. How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild Yang et al., ICSE'18 is the exception to that rule. This study examined 12 popular, mature, opensource Rails apps ... 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

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