RailsLab

State of the Stack: A Ruby on Rails Benchmarking Report - 7 January 2010

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:49:00 -0800

As of 31 December 2009

Because New Relic RPM is used by more than 3,000 organizations to manage their Ruby on Rails and Java applications in production, we have unique insight into how thousands of applications are deployed.

Since April, 2009, we have periodically published a summary of the most commonly used versions of Ruby, Rails and the various plugins deployed for Ruby applications. This report enables you to compare your own deployed application stack with those used by other development teams. Are you behind the curve in Ruby? Are there some plugins that your team may want to consider? This is a good place to start that conversation. Later this year we will publish benchmarks of the Java stacks our customers use.

Many of our customers have opted in to have their performance data shared with the Rails Core Team to aid in the team’s ongoing work on the platform. In addition to that data New Relic also aggregates information on the versions of OS, Ruby, and Rails used and the various plugins deployed.

In this report we list only the most commonly used Ruby and Rails versions and only the most commonly used plugins because a complete list is too long to post here and is probably not all that useful. This report does not cover Gems.

And without further ado…

Most Commonly Deployed Ruby Versions
(% of RPM Users)

Ruby 1.8.6 remains the most widely deployed version. That said, 1.8.7 has seen a marked increase in usage since our last report in June, going from 5% to 30% in just a few months.

Most Commonly Deployed Rails Versions
(% of RPM Users)

2.3.2 remains widely deployed as we reported in June, though most of our customers are now using 2.3.4, which was released in early September 2009. A significant percentage are also using 2.3.5, released at the end of November.

Most Commonly Used Plugins
(% of RPM Users)

While the top five plugins remain unchanged since June, hoptoad_notifiier has replaced exception_notification as the most common plugin, with over 50% of our user base having deployed it.

How to read the Plugin data: Of all New Relic customers deployed into production, X% have this plugin installed in an application. This does not represent market share or total adoption within the Rails community. It represents the percent of New Relic customers who have the plugin deployed.

UPDATE: We are now capturing the Gems deployed by our customers as well. Here is a list of the top 50 Gems in use (from a list of more than 2000.)

mislav-will_paginate
haml
authlogic
RedCloth
fastercsv
will_paginate
hpricot
aws-s3
json
chronic
geokit
nokogiri
thoughtbot-paperclip
rubyist-aasm
paperclip
calendar_date_select
mime-types
right_aws
searchlogic
javan-whenever
prawn
oauth
formtastic
daemons
thoughtbot-factory_girl
activemerchant
httparty
rmagick
rack
twitter
mysql
ruby-openid
faker
uuidtools
memcache-client
htmlentities
money
thoughtbot-shoulda
friendly_id
whenever
rubyzip
chriseppstein-compass
libxml-ruby
rspec
thinking-sphinx
rspec-rails
mocha
justinfrench-formtastic
sanitize
builder

Comments?

We would like to get your feedback on this report. Is it useful? What do you find interesting in the data? Use the Feedback button below. Thanks.

Episode #21 - On The Edge - Part 3

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:43:00 -0700

This is the last of three screencasts where looking at a couple new libraries to help you scale your Rails applications. In this episode we start by learning about rubber, a capistrano/rails plugin that makes it easy to deploy/manage/scale on Amazon EC2. Then we look at a background job system with a killer user interface called Cloud Crowd. Lastly we look at a web service called Mad Mimi, which allows you to keep track of mailing lists and even move all of your mailer erb templates out of your web application. Utilizing Mad Mimi’s API can give your customer more control of their mailing lists, and alleviate some developer frustration surrounding email.

To keep up to date with additional libraries which may help with Scaling, be sure to listen to the Ruby5 Podcast.

Play Video (81.7 MB, 17:07, MP4)

Episode #20 - On The Edge - Part 2

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:40:00 -0700

In this screencast we discover what typically causes Ruby server memory bloat, namely instantiating too many ActiveRecord objects. Thankfully there are several plugins which can help you detect when your application needs some help, and where your application is hurting the most. We start by taking a look at Rack-Bug, a toolbar which places all sorts of statistics about each requests at your fingertips. Next, we look at two libraries to help specifically track memory bloat; Memory Logic and Oink.

Play Video (49.5 MB, 10:21, MP4)

Episode #19 - On The Edge - Part 1

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:35:00 -0700

This is the first of three screencasts where we begin to look at a few new Rails libraries to help you scale your Rails applications. In this first episode we take a look at Bullet, which will help you optimize your SQL queries by giving you growl notifications when you’re not using eager loading properly or should be using a counter cache. Then there’s Rails Indexes which provides Rake tasks to find missing indexes in your database. Finally the last library we’ll learn about is Scrooge, a SQL query optimizer which can reduce the amount of data getting sent from your database to your Rails application.

All of these libraries I learned about from the Ruby5 Podcast, a twice weekly audio podcast covering the latest news in the Ruby and Rails Community.

Play Video (41.4 MB, 8:49, MP4)

Webinar Replay: Optimizing Your Online Store for the Holidays

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:52:00 -0700

In this session Brian Doll, manager of software development at Sheet Music Plus, the nation’s leading online provider of sheet music, shares his tips on preparing your site optimal application performance, capacity and scalability during the peak season. In addition to providing specific optimization examples, Brian discusses a number of helpful steps in detail. These include:

Analyze the architecture to understand dependencies
Analyze the business to understand customer behavior
Measure everything that can be measured
Embrace change by being responsive

Play Video (35 MB, 20:21, MPEG-4)

Ward Cunningham, AboutUs.org

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:02:00 -0700

Ward Cunningham of AboutUs.org shares his thoughts on Agile development and the need to compliment the use of specific tools and processes with mastery of development techniques.

Play Video (78.6 MB, 6:50, MPEG-4)

Webinar Replay: Using Apdex to Improve Online Customer Satisfaction

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:26:00 -0700

In this fast-paced, 30-minute session Peter Sevcik, founder and executive director of the Apdex Alliance, provides an overview of Apdex, an open standard for reporting, benchmarking, and tracking application performance. New Relic consultant Steve Hudson follows with real-world examples of how to measure Apdex scores in production Rails or Java web applications using RPM.

Play Video (34 MB, 25:19, MP4)

Lior Shiff, Product Madness - pt. 2

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:56:00 -0700

In part two of his discussion, Lior Shiff of Product Madness talks about the benefits of developing in Rails including, ease of use, maintainability, scalability. The talk concludes with an overview of effective development, testing and monitoring tools.

Part Two: Rails, Architecture, and Scalability. Oh My!
Play Audio (16.3 MB, 12:14, MP3)

Lior Shiff, Product Madness - pt. 1

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:55:00 -0700

Lior Shiff, CEO and Founder of Product Madness, discusses the benefits and challenges of developing social applications in dynamic, rapidly changing environments. He also shares valuable advice for Facebook developers.

Part One: Introductions + Developing for Social Networks
Play Audio (14.2 MB, 12:25, MP3)

Jesse Proudman, Blue Box Group - pt. 1

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:48:00 -0700

Listen to Jesse Proudman of Blue Box Group offer insights and advice for companies deciding whether to move to a Cloud-computing environment. Topics include:

To Cloud or Not to Cloud
Top 3 considerations for moving to the cloud
Key security and compliance concerns
Managing performance SLAs
Scaling rails applications
The importance of memcache

Choosing the Right Hosting Environment
Play Video (68.9 MB, 10:51, QuickTime MOV)
Play Video (130.2 MB, 10:51, MPEG-4 Video)

Jesse Proudman, Blue Box Group - pt. 2

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:48:00 -0700

Listen to Jesse Proudman of Blue Box Group offer insights and advice for companies deciding whether to move to a Cloud-computing environment. Topics include:

To Cloud or Not to Cloud
Top 3 considerations for moving to the cloud
Key security and compliance concerns
Managing performance SLAs
Scaling rails applications
The importance of memcache

Planning and Scaling Rails Deployments
Play Video (97.6 MB, 15:20, QuickTime MOV)
Play Video (185.6 MB, 15:20, MPEG-4 Video)

Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko, Heroku - pt. 1

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:47:00 -0700

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.

Introductions + The Heroku Vision
Play Video (52.5 MB, 8:51, QuickTime MOV)
Play Video (107.3 MB, 8:51, MPEG-4 video)

Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko, Heroku - pt. 2

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:46:00 -0700

Performance + Best Practices
Play Video (70.3 MB, 12:14, QuickTime MOV)
Play Video (148.1 MB, 12:14, MPEG-4 video)

Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko, Heroku - pt. 3

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:44:00 -0700

Tools + Collaboration
Play Video (39.2 MB, 6:46, QuickTime MOV)
Play Video (81.6 MB, 6:46, MPEG-4 video)

Episode #18 - Scaling Your Database - Part 2

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:41:00 -0700

In this second screencast we start out by learning the differences between the myISAM and InnoDB database engines for MySQL. Next we learn how to scale a write heavy database by using Master Master replication, and how we might configure this to work with our Rails application. Lastly we’ll figure out how to shard our database by spliting our tables between multiple databases and show how both New Relic and eBay take advantage of this technique.

Play Video (31 MB, 14:20, MP4)

Episode #17 - Scaling Your Database - Part 1

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:49:00 -0700

If the bottleneck of your application is your database even after caching as much as possible, what can you do? This is the first of two screencasts where we’re going to learn about techniques for increasing the power of your Database. In this first video we learn how to grow our database step by step using both vertical and horizontal scaling.

Play Video (26.3 MB, 11:20, MP4)

Thorsten von Eicken, RightScale

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:04:00 -0700

Thorsten von Eicken, CTO and founder of RightScale, shares his insights on the advantages of deploying in the cloud. Discussion topics include design, implementation, and management considerations for cloud-based apps.

Play Video (42.4 MB, 6:50, QuickTime MOV)
Play Video (82.2 MB, 6:50, MPEG-4 video)

Episode #16 - Load Testing - Part 2

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:51:00 -0700

This is the second of two episodes where we learn the basics of Load Testing our web applications. In this episode we take a look at autobench, a tool that automates our httperf load tests, then we’ll figure out how to visualize our httperf results in a graph, and finally take a brief look at a few other Load Testing tools you might want to get familiar with.

Play Video (34 MB, 11:15, MP4)

Episode #15 - Load Testing - Part 1

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:43:00 -0700

One way to measure the scalability of your Rails application is to use Load Testing. This is the first of two screencasts where we attempt to give an introduction to load testing and show how to use two of the most basic Load Testing tools, Apache Bench and httperf.

Play Video (52 MB, 15:09, MP4)

The State of the Stack: A Ruby on Rails Benchmarking Report - 10 June 2009

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:24:00 -0700

As of June 10, 2009

New Relic helps more than 1,800 organizations manage their Ruby on Rails applications in production. This gives us unique insight into how thousands of applications are deployed. Many of our customers have opted in to have their performance data shared with the Rails Core Team to aid in the team’s ongoing work on the platform. In addition to that data New Relic also aggregates information on the versions of OS, Ruby, and Rails used and the various plugins deployed.

We first published this data in April, 2009. Though it’s only been two months, there have been some changes in the stack stats since then. For example, deployment of Ruby 1.8.6 (i686-linux) has increased five-fold and the same version on universal-darwin doubled. Adoption of the latest Rails versions is pretty rapid as we see Rails 2.3.2 increasing from only 4.4% of our customers to nearly 30%. The most commonly used plugins list is essentially the same though there are some movements in the order of adoption.

We list only the most commonly used versions and plugins because a complete list is too long to post here and is probably not all that useful. This report does not cover Gems, which will be included in a future report.

Ruby
(% of RPM Users)

Version		Apps Using (%)
	1.8.6 (x86_64-linux)	25.66
	1.8.6 (universal-darwin9.0)	12.60
	1.8.6 (i686-linux)	11.91
	1.8.6 (i486-linux)	6.00
	1.8.7 (i486-linux)	5.31
	1.8.7 (x86_64-linux)	5.08
	1.8.6 (i386-mswin32)	3.55
	1.8.5 (i386-linux)	3.05
	1.8.7 (i686-darwin9)	3.00
	1.8.7 (i686-linux)	2.86
	1.8.5 (x86_64-linux)	2.68
	1.8.6 (i386-linux)	1.98
	1.8.6 (i686-darwin9.6.0)	1.34
	1.8.5 (i486-linux)	1.34
	1.8.6 (java)	0.92
	1.8.7 (i686-darwin9.6.0)	0.88
	1.8.7 (i386-solaris2)	0.74
	1.8.6 (i386-solaris2)	0.69
	1.8.6 (i686-darwin8.11.1)	0.51
	All Others	10.00

Rails
(% of RPM Users)

Plugins
(% of RPM Users)

Comments?

We would like to get your feedback on this report. Is it useful? What do you find interesting in the data? Use the Feedback button below. Thanks.

RailsLab

State of the Stack: A Ruby on Rails Benchmarking Report - 7 January 2010

Most Commonly Deployed Ruby Versions (% of RPM Users)

Most Commonly Deployed Rails Versions (% of RPM Users)

Most Commonly Used Plugins (% of RPM Users)

Comments?

Episode #21 - On The Edge - Part 3

Episode #20 - On The Edge - Part 2

Episode #19 - On The Edge - Part 1

Webinar Replay: Optimizing Your Online Store for the Holidays

Ward Cunningham, AboutUs.org

Webinar Replay: Using Apdex to Improve Online Customer Satisfaction

Lior Shiff, Product Madness - pt. 2

Lior Shiff, Product Madness - pt. 1

Jesse Proudman, Blue Box Group - pt. 1

Jesse Proudman, Blue Box Group - pt. 2

Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko, Heroku - pt. 1

Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko, Heroku - pt. 2

Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko, Heroku - pt. 3

Episode #18 - Scaling Your Database - Part 2

Episode #17 - Scaling Your Database - Part 1

Thorsten von Eicken, RightScale

Episode #16 - Load Testing - Part 2

Episode #15 - Load Testing - Part 1

The State of the Stack: A Ruby on Rails Benchmarking Report - 10 June 2009

Ruby (% of RPM Users)

Rails (% of RPM Users)

Plugins (% of RPM Users)

Comments?

Most Commonly Deployed Ruby Versions
(% of RPM Users)

Most Commonly Deployed Rails Versions
(% of RPM Users)

Most Commonly Used Plugins
(% of RPM Users)

Ruby
(% of RPM Users)

Rails
(% of RPM Users)

Plugins
(% of RPM Users)