State of the 2017 Rails Stack

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

Elixir foundations for Ruby Devs: transforming data

This is a guest post by Tomasz Kowal, a software developer currently working full time with Elixir at ClubCollect. He started with Erlang 6 years ago and is still amazed by the power functional languages provide. In his free time he likes tinkering with flying robots. Have you ever reached ... Read more

DevTrace and the Art of Staying the F*** Out of the Way

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

Faster PostgreSQL Searches with Trigrams

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

A Six-Pronged Rails Performance Philosophy

"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

3 pleasantly surprising PostgreSQL Indexing tricks

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

Rails Performance and the root of all evil

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

Getting down with Stackprof: how we added N+1 query detection to Scout

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

Monitoring Sidekiq Jobs

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

3 Git Productivity Hacks

Most Ruby developers use Git for their version control system of choice. Git is a wonderful tool that can save you countless hours of lost productivity and makes collaborating with others a cinch. Git's distributed nature also allows devs to work anywhere with or without an internet connection without fear ... Read more

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