Performance Monitoring Roundup: Rails Core and New Relic Cooperate, FiveRuns TuneUp Supports Merb

Posted by Werner Schuster on Oct 29, 2008

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Enterprise Architecture,

Architecture & Design,

Development

Topics

Ruby on Rails ,

Ruby ,

Dynamic Languages ,

Performance Tuning ,

Languages ,

SaaS ,

Scalability ,

Programming ,

Cloud Computing ,

Merb ,

Rails ,

Performance & Scalability ,

Rails Plugins ,

FiveRuns

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NewRelic recently made the entry level version of their monitoring tool available for free.

A new cooperation between NewRelic and the Rails Core team is now supposed to help improve Rails:

New Relic [..] today announced a first-of-its-kind program that enables Rails developers to share application performance data with the Rails Core Development Team. The Core Team will use the data to analyze and optimize application performance on Rails, ultimately speeding this popular development platform’s industry adoption.

NewRelic's RPM tool works by installing a Rails plugin, which reports performance data to the NewRelic server, where it can be viewed and analyzed. Now, with this opt-in data share option, it's possible to allow the Rails Core team to analyze performance data of Rails applications, and see how real world Rails applications behave and where common bottlenecks are. Since the data is already available on NewRelic's servers, making it available to the Rails core team is easy (from the press release):

The performance data sharing program is available as a feature within New Relic RPM. Information is not shared with anyone outside the Rails Core Team. To learn more about RPM and to subscribe, visit http://newrelic.com/get-RPM.html.
You can also plug in to RPM Lite for free, unlimited use in production. Installation and setup take less than 5 minutes. Sign up by visiting
http://newrelic.com/RPMlite.html.
No credit card or payment needed. Once RPM is installed, join the program by checking the opt-in box within the RPM administration screen.

In related news, iPhone users will be interested to see NewRelic's GUI's now optimized for iPhone web access.

Merb, which will go 1.0 soon, is now supported by FiveRuns' TuneUp performance monitoring tool. The Merb TuneUp support consists of the following:

Currently, TuneUp for Merb provides information on filters, renders, and DataMapper activity (let us know what other ORMs you’d like to see. Sequel? ActiveRecord?). You can see what proportion of time you’re spending in the model, view, or controller, as well as how long each step takes to execute, where it’s being called (with support to jump to those files in TextMate), and for DataMapper activity the SQL query that was executed and a detailed breakdown of the Query object.

TuneUp for Merb is deployed as a Merb Slice.

Which performance monitoring or profiling tool do you use?

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   FiveRuns

   by Dean Cruse

   Thanks for the FiveRuns mention, Werner. We're excited about the new Merb support and are getting great feedback from customers who are using it to tune up their Merb apps.
   
   On the Rails performance front, we all look forward to continued performance improvements in Rails. But I think the engine can only do so much. Even if the underlying framework screams, customers' implementations of it will vary. Our customers use our service and the performance metrics it provides to make their Rails applications perform better, and to fix problems when they occur. So, we have focused our efforts on providing useful metrics, visualizations, and some new deployment and optimization services to help them scale up their applications.

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   JRuby Monitoring

   by William Louth

   If you are running Ruby applications on the JRuby VM then you also have the option of using JXInsight's JRuby-to-Ruby extension giving you a native Java runtime performance monitoring (metering/profiler) solution that out performs the competition (20x-100x in SPECjvm2008 benchmarks).
   
   williamlouth.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/cross-lan...

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