Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Still more Rails profiling

analysis
Jul 10, 20083 mins

37signals has been using New Relic RPM to profile its Ruby on Rails application performance and reduce their response times

It never rains but it pours. When I mentioned the free FiveRuns TuneUp in Wednesday’s posting Profiling Rails, I didn’t know about its subscription-based competitor New Relic RPM. New Relic was founded by Lew Cirne, Mark Sachleben, and Jim Gochee, who were the principals of Wily Technology and the people behind Introscope. Wily was acquired by CA in 2006.

A press release about New Relic RPM and 37Signals, the company behind Ruby on Rails and Basecamp, just crossed my desk. Here it is in its entirety:

37signals cuts its response time with New Relic

New Relic RPM helps speed key action response by 50% for the company that created Ruby on Rails

Menlo Park, CA — July 10, 2008 New Relic, Inc. today announced that 37signals, the standard-setting Ruby on Rails company, and maker of web-based applications like Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, and Backpack, has standardized on New Relic RPM to keep performance humming.

Since April 2008, 37signals has relied on New Relic RPM to standardize performance management for all its applications. With New Relic, 37signals isolates and fixes any performance problems fast—before customers find them. “After we installed New Relic, we learned that Highrise response times were considerably higher on a few key actions than we’d like,” said Rails inventor and 37signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson. “We spent some time optimizing and confirmed through RPM that we had achieved a 50% speedup on those key actions.”

37signals continues to use New Relic to optimize its applications across its entire production environment of more than 20 hosts. “New Relic RPM has dramatically improved the way we monitor the health and performance of our applications,” said Mark Imbriaco, System Administrator of 37signals. “With RPM we’re able to identify potential bottlenecks in a fraction of the time and with much less effort than ever before.”

37signals is joined by more than 500 Ruby on Rails developers who now use RPM to stop performance problems in their tracks. With RPM, they can see things like slowest controller actions, busiest and slowest active record operations, and missing indices. Then they can drill down to get meaningful insights into application performance, isolating problems down to the minute they occur. RPM displays automatic breakdowns of such controller response times as ActiveRecord, memcache, and rendering. Overall application hotspots appear in a single view.

“Developers look to 37signals as the standard for Ruby on Rails applications,” said Lew Cirne, CEO and Founder for New Relic. “Now that RPM is one of their weapons, 37signals can keep response times down without parsing log files and other time consuming or costly tasks. Even though 37signals has had a million users, their best practices can be adopted by any company, right down to a single developer working on an application prototype. RPM starts small with you, and grows with you. So you can use it whether you have one user or millions.”

Rails developers can try New Relic RPM for free. Get RPM Developer Mode at https://newrelic.com/get-RPM.html. When an application is ready for production, developers can upgrade by subscribing to RPM. To monitor your Rails app in production a la 37signals, subscribe to RPM Production Mode at https://newrelic.com/get-RPM.html. Once installed, RPM immediately begins collecting critical data, enabling developers to get to the bottom of performance problems.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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