Introduction

Welcome to the Scaling Rails Screencast Series produced by Gregg Pollack and supported by New Relic.

In the next few weeks we’re going to bring you 13 educational videos, teaching you just about everything you need to know to create a Rails application that can scale

Play Video (10.4 MB, 2:13, MP4)

Episode #1 - Page Responsiveness

Before we can talk about Server-side performance, we need to go over Client-side performance.  We’re talking about how fast your website comes up in a user’s browser.

Play Video (49.8 MB, 12:11, MP4)

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Episode #3 - Cache Expiration

When you start caching html content which depends on data in your database, what happens when that data changes? You’re going to need to expire that cache, and in this episode, we show you how Rails makes this quite easy.

Play Video (20.9 MB, 5:51, MP4)

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Episode #4 - New Relic RPM

Before you attempt to Scale your Rails application, you need to know where and how to scale it.  This is where New Relic’s RPM service comes in.  In this screencast we’ll show you how easy it is to setup, and how useful it can be to monitor your Rails app.

Play Video (65.1 MB, 13:05, MP4)

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.

Play Video (13.1 MB, 6:04, MOV)
Play Video (8 MB, 6:04, MPEG-4 video)