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Welcome to RailsLab! This site has been created to give you a source for Rails application performance expertise. A place you can visit often to learn the techniques of the performance masters. Learn how to get the most from your Rails applications. Add to your own knowledge and share what you have learned with others. We welcome submissions, suggestions and ideas. To get the most out of RailsLab, subscribe to our feeds so you are alerted when new content is added. Enjoy RailsLab.

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New Scaling Rails Episodes

Scaling Rails Gregg Pollack explores yet more ways to optimize and scale your Rails application. Over the next few weeks we'll release three screencasts where we begin to look at a few new Rails libraries to help you scale your Rails applications. In the first episode we take a look at Bullet, Rails Indexes, and Scrooge.

Check out Episode 19 - On the Edge, Part 1 »
Check out Episode 20 - On the Edge, Part 2 »
Check out Episode 21 - On the Edge, Part 3 »

Webinar Replay: Optimizing Your Online Store for the Holidays with Brian Doll, SheetMusicPlus.com

Brian Doll, manager of software development at Sheet Music Plus shares his tips on preparing your site optimal application performance, capacity and scalability during the peak season. View the Replay »

Master's Interview: Ward Cunningham, AboutUs.org

Listen as Ward Cunningham of AboutUs.org shares his thoughts and advice on best practices for successful Agile development. Check out the Interview »

Webinar Replay: Using Apdex to Improve Online Customer Satisfaction

Peter Sevcik, founder and executive director of the Apdex Alliance, and New Relic consultant Steve Hudson illustrate how the Apdex standard is used to measure online customer satisfaction. View the Replay »

Master's Interview: Lior Shiff, Product Madness

Lior Shiff and Mike Malloy In this two-part discussion Lior Shiff of Product Madness discusses the challenges of building social apps for Facebook and MySpace. He offers advice for Facebook developers, touches on the benefits of Rails, and closes with thoughts on effective testing and monitoring tools.

Part 1: Introductions + Developing for Social Networks
Part 2: Rails, Architecture, and Scalability. Oh My!

Master's Interview: Jesse Proudman, Blue Box Group

Jesse Proudman of Blue Box Group shares valuable advice for companies considering migrating to the Cloud.

Part 1: Choosing the Right Hosting Environment
Part 2: Planning and Scaling Rails Deployments

Master's Interview: Thorsten von Eicken, RightScale

Thorsten shares his insights on the advantages of deploying in the cloud. Discussion topics include design, implementation, and management considerations for cloud-based apps. check out the interview »

Master's Interview: Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko, Heroku

An interview in 3 parts with Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko of Heroku from their recent visit to New Relic. They discuss the vision behind the creation of Heroku, their passion for helping developers create scalable, high-performance Rails apps in the cloud, taking full advantage of cloud deployment, and their tips and best practices to create a high-performance app.

Part 1: Introductions + The Heroku Vision
Part 2: Performance + Best Practices
Part 3: Tools + Collaboration

Benchmarking Reports

New Relic helps over 1,800 Rails organizations monitor and manage their applications. This gives us insight into the application stacks used by developers around the world. The State of the Stack is a report which lists the most commonly used versions of Ruby, Rails, and plugins in actual production applications. Compare the benchmarks to your own stack.

2 April 2009 Report
10 June 2009 Report

Application Server Provisioning and Tuning

There's tons of information out there for Rails developers, but help for Ops teams is seemingly a bit thin. Bayard Carlin, New Relic's Director of Technical Operations, walks us through the steps New Relic made to tune their app servers for maximum efficiency. more »

Scalable Teams

When talking about scalability we often mean hardware or software. However, a key aspect of software projects is the human factor. It’s also a key expense. Wolfram Arnold at RubyFocus, a RoR consulting and talent acquisition company, investigates what it takes to scale your development team. His investigation leads him to Pivotal Labs, a leading agile development firm, where he interviews Edward Hieatt and Davis Frank. Here he gains a unique view into their development process and what makes them successful.

Part 1: Communication
Part 2: Leadership

Developing for Performance with Jim Gochee

RAILS_ENV=local_production

Jim walks us through connecting a local development environment to a remote production database. Doing this allows you to accurately reproduce bugs and test new features against real production data. more »

How Performance Feedback can Reduce Testing in Agile Development

It may be heresy in some circles, but Agile shops are finding that they can bring new features to GA faster and retain their quality AND eliminate some forms of testing by including performance management in the developer toolkit. Jim Gochee describes how this works for New Relic and for Aboutus.org. more »

Meet the Scaling Rails Series

Learn everything you need to know about Scaling your Rails app through 13 informative Screencasts produced by Gregg Pollack with the support of New Relic. Visit the Scaling Rails area »

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contents

Scaling Rails

Master's Interviews

Developing for Performance

Rails Teamwork

Benchmarking Reports

Welcome

New Scaling Rails Episodes

Webinar Replay: Optimizing Your Online Store for the Holidays with Brian Doll, SheetMusicPlus.com

Master's Interview: Ward Cunningham, AboutUs.org

Webinar Replay: Using Apdex to Improve Online Customer Satisfaction

Master's Interview: Lior Shiff, Product Madness

Master's Interview: Jesse Proudman, Blue Box Group

Master's Interview: Thorsten von Eicken, RightScale

Master's Interview: Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko, Heroku

Benchmarking Reports

2 April 2009 Report
10 June 2009 Report

Application Server Provisioning and Tuning

Scalable Teams

Part 1: Communication
Part 2: Leadership

Developing for Performance with Jim Gochee

RAILS_ENV=local_production

How Performance Feedback can Reduce Testing in Agile Development

Meet the Scaling Rails Series

feed me

email notification

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