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. Scaling with hardware is a common approach, however hardware alone cannot scale an application. (It’s also an expensive approach.) 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. Bayard presents us with some tips and tricks to maximize the efficiency of your current app servers and continue tuning and tweaking them as your application grows.

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Episode #17 - Scaling Your Database - Part 1

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.

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Episode #18 - Scaling Your Database - Part 2

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.

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Episode #19 - On The Edge - Part 1

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.

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