A big part of providing good support is making it painless. At Scout , Andre and I handle all of the support requests. Once we’ve gathered the account information, it usually doesn’t take much time to help. The problem is quickly putting the account information together. We don’t want to ... Read more

UPDATED 6/7/2013 – We no longer recommend using bash -l -c to run Cron jobs with RVM . See our updated approach . This info is for Scout users, but it’s also applicable to anyone who’s wondered how to use cron together with RVM . This assumes 1) you are ... Read more

I was back in Michigan a few weeks ago visiting family. These trips always involve a “what do you do?” question at some point. I’m never sure how to answer. “I have a startup.” Honestly, I don’t think of Scout as a startup. Scout is a business built the old-fashion ... Read more

If you’ve used Major Hayden’s MySQLTuner before, you know it’s a great source of MySQL optimization tips. Now you can get MySQLTuner reports automatically delivered through Scout. All you need to do is install the MySQL Stats w/MySQLTuner plugin , or update the plugin if you already have it installed. ... Read more

Updated 3/21/2013 – The MongoDB Overview plugin discussed below has been split into 2 separate plugins: MongoDB Server Status and MongoDB Database Stats . The server status plugin reports global MongoDB metrics and the database stats plugin reports metrics specific to a particular database. John Nunemaker of Ordered List knows ... Read more

You maintain a growing Rails application and you’re seeing something peculiar. Sometimes when you use the application, it feels like the performance deteriorates significantly. However, all of your performance data shows no issues – requests in the Rails log file look speedy, CPU utilization is fine, database performance is solid, ... Read more

Thanks to Jacob Harris , we have a MongoDB Slow Queries plugin for Scout. The MongoDB plugin captures the number of slow queries per minute according to the threshold you specify. It also reports details of any slow queries that take place. Of course, like any other Scout plugin, you ... Read more

~ or ~ Sysadmin Eye for the Dev Guy Developers! You can churn out a Rails or Sinatra app in no time. What about putting it out there in production? Occasionally forget the syntax for crontab or logrotate? Yeah, me too. That's why I wrote up a few essential notes ... Read more

Older baseball players typically have plenty of power and discipline but are slow runners with lower batting averages. It’s kind of obvious: as we get older, we get bigger and more patient, but we also get slower. This characteristic even has a name, described as (you guessed it): old player ... Read more

Say your Rails application is running in production and it’s getting good traffic, but performance isn’t as good you would like. You’ve already determined that your database is not the bottleneck. What’s your next move? Well, there is a good chance that Passenger’s PassengerMaxPoolSize needs to be adjusted. Read more