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

Before Scout , my experience developing software was primarily consulting. Success was measured by delivering software on time and on budget. With Scout, a subscription-based service, my focus isn’t on scheduling. We are self-funded and we didn’t have the luxury of a venture-backed startup. We’re focused on figuring out which ... Read more

We’ve been deleting a lot of code from Scout. We’re ripping out major infrastructure, and in doing so, pulling the plug on functionality which, just six months ago, we believed would be crucial to our business. Most importantly, we’re simplifying the most complex, error-prone, and poorly-performing parts of the application. ... Read more

Our recent update to Scout featured a revised UI, more functionality, and a new Scout Agent. While it’s easy to see the changes in the UI, a lot of the work conducted by the agent happens beneath the surface. The Scout Agent, which is installed on a server you wish ... Read more

Sinatra , a Ruby DSL for quickly creating web applications with minimal effort, forms a key part of the Scout infrastructure. James Gray talks about how we use Sinatra at Scout via RubyLearning.org – 20+ Rubyists are using Sinatra ...“ Do you? For more on how Scout works: A tour ... Read more

It’s been almost a year since we launched Scout , and over the past couple of months, we’ve been working on a big new release. We’ll be showing off Scout’s new features at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference on April 17th and 18th and at RailsConf on May 4th-7th. Hope ... Read more

Life as a cross-dresser must be unnerving. I could buy a wig, put some makeup on my adam’s apple. Buy a skirt. Does a sock-filled bra work for my bosom? With a bit of mood lighting, I might actually look like a woman, but it would be difficult to relax. ... Read more

We’ve seen lots of people waste time tracing the Rails stack for performance issues when the cause is usually quite simpler – look at the obvious places first before digging through the Rails stack. Read more

Robin Ward of Forumwarz has released a MySQL slow queries plugin for Scout that does exactly what you’d expect: sends an alert when a slow query is run. Derek Laptop"/> The alert contains the full query along with the query time: Alert"/> Note that you’ll need to enable slow query ... Read more