Posts Tagged ‘rails’


Getting Started with the Rails 3 BugMash

1.15.10 by Nathaniel Bibler

This is a short writeup to help everyone get ready for the Rails 3 BugMash. The following steps and notes were taken to help you put together a new, working Rails 3 application. Many of these steps will match Yehuda Katz’s post on getting started.

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Scaling Rails – On The Edge – Part 3

11.25.09 by Gregg Pollack

You can now watch the last episode of the three part series covering some of the newest libraries for helping you scale your Rails apps. This screencast dives into three new libraries that each can help you scale your website in a different way. We start with an introduction to rubber, an alternative to chef / chef deploy which can help you to quickly deploy a server cluster in the cloud. Then we take a look at Cloud Crowd, a completely Ruby background processor which can perform map reduce. Lastly we dive into a web service called Mad Mimi, which isn’t just useful for maintaining mailing lists, but can also host all of your app’s emails.

Scaling Rails

Download this Episode – (81.7 MB, 17:07, MP4)

In this second episode I introduce three tools:

  • rubber – A capistrano/rails plugin for deploying to Amazon ec2.
  • Cloud Crowd – Background job processor with map reduce.
  • Mad Mimi – Scale your mailing lists / campaign emails

These screencasts look great on your iPhone, so I highly encourage you to subscribe and download them on iTunes. Also, to keep up to date on the latest news in the Ruby and Rails community, be sure to check out the Ruby5 podcast if you haven’t already. Thanks!

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Scaling Rails – On The Edge – Part 2

11.13.09 by Gregg Pollack

Last week I released the first of a three part series covering some of the newest libraries for helping you scale your Rails apps. Today I bring you part two of the series which starts with a discussion of this article from Sudara Williams. In the article Sudara talks about the true reason why Rails apps can start hogging memory, and then suggests three tools to help prevent this bloat. In this screencast I show you how to use rack-bug, memorylogic, and oink, the three tools he recommends.

Scaling Rails

Download this Episode – (49.5 MB, 10:21, MP4)

In this second episode I introduce three tools:

  • rack-bug – Rails middleware which gives you an informative toolbar in your browser.
  • memorylogic – Gives your logger a memory footprint.
  • oink – Provides metrics on your worst memory bloated requests.

These screencasts look great on your iPhone, so I highly encourage you to subscribe and download them on iTunes. Also, to keep up to date on the latest news in the Ruby and Rails community, be sure to check out the Ruby5 podcast if you haven’t already. Thanks!

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Scaling Rails – On The Edge – Part 1

11.5.09 by Gregg Pollack

It’s been a while since I’ve released a new Scaling Rails Screencast, but this morning I’m happy to announce that three new screencasts have been produced and the first one is being released today. In these screencasts I’m going to introduce you to 9 new Ruby and Rails libraries which can help you scale your rails application.

Scaling Rails

Download this Episode – (41.4 MB, 8:49, MP4)

In this first episode I introduce three tools:

  • Bullet – Help you reduce the number of queries with alerts (and growl).
  • Rails Indexes – Rake tasks to find missing indexes.
  • Scrooge – SQL query optimizer, so you query for only what your page needs.

These screencasts look great on your iPhone, so I highly encourage you to subscribe and download them on iTunes. Also, to keep up to date on the latest news in the Ruby and Rails community, be sure to check out the Ruby5 podcast if you haven’t already. Thanks!

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The Rails State Machine

8.5.09 by Nathaniel Bibler

Go and StopRuby on Rails recently added a built-in ActiveRecord::StateMachine implementation and even more recently tied it in to ActiveRecord. And, for being a built-in library, it’s pretty damned fully-featured. Really, if this one doesn’t do it for you, then you probably need to write it yourself, anyway.

And, if you’re thinking that you don’t know what a state machine is, or think that you’ve never used one, think again. If you’ve ever used the restful_authentication plugin, you’ve probably used a state machine. In that library, Users can be pending, active, inactive … It’s all the same object, just acting differently depending on its current situation. That, in a nutshell, is a state machine.

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Set Up Your Server Right, Part 1

8.5.09 by Thomas Meeks

A little background

Server Rack

Unix administrators have been dealing with the same problems for a long, long time. Users and programs contending for resources, outside attackers trying to get in, crashing services. You name it. There are a lot of excellent utilities out there to handle all of these issues. Unfortunately, they go mostly unused.

Ever have an application, of any language, eat up memory or disk space to the point of slowing the entire system to a crawl? Seen a security breach in one web application compromise a whole server? Had a server encounter performance problems that seem to disappear by the time you make it into top? I’ve joined a number of projects where problems like these are constant, nagging issues. They really don’t need to be.

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