In this fast-paced, 30-minute session Peter Sevcik, founder and executive director of the Apdex Alliance, provides an overview of Apdex, an open standard for reporting, benchmarking, and tracking application performance. New Relic consultant Steve Hudson follows with real-world examples of how to measure Apdex scores in production Rails or Java web applications using RPM.

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In this session Brian Doll, manager of software development at Sheet Music Plus, the nation’s leading online provider of sheet music, shares his tips on preparing your site optimal application performance, capacity and scalability during the peak season. In addition to providing specific optimization examples, Brian discusses a number of helpful steps in detail. These include:

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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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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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Listen to Jesse Proudman of Blue Box Group offer insights and advice for companies deciding whether to move to a Cloud-computing environment. Topics include:

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Lior Shiff, CEO and Founder of Product Madness, discusses the benefits and challenges of developing social applications in dynamic, rapidly changing environments. He also shares valuable advice for Facebook developers.

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Listen to Jesse Proudman of Blue Box Group offer insights and advice for companies deciding whether to move to a Cloud-computing environment. Topics include:

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In part two of his discussion, Lior Shiff of Product Madness talks about the benefits of developing in Rails including, ease of use, maintainability, scalability. The talk concludes with an overview of effective development, testing and monitoring tools.

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Ward Cunningham of AboutUs.org shares his thoughts on Agile development and the need to compliment the use of specific tools and processes with mastery of development techniques.

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This is the last of three screencasts where looking at a couple new libraries to help you scale your Rails applications. In this episode we start by learning about rubber, a capistrano/rails plugin that makes it easy to deploy/manage/scale on Amazon EC2. Then we look at a background job system with a killer user interface called Cloud Crowd. Lastly we look at a web service called Mad Mimi, which allows you to keep track of mailing lists and even move all of your mailer erb templates out of your web application. Utilizing Mad Mimi’s API can give your customer more control of their mailing lists, and alleviate some developer frustration surrounding email.

To keep up to date with additional libraries which may help with Scaling, be sure to listen to the Ruby5 Podcast.

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In this screencast we discover what typically causes Ruby server memory bloat, namely instantiating too many ActiveRecord objects. Thankfully there are several plugins which can help you detect when your application needs some help, and where your application is hurting the most. We start by taking a look at Rack-Bug, a toolbar which places all sorts of statistics about each requests at your fingertips. Next, we look at two libraries to help specifically track memory bloat; Memory Logic and Oink.

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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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Thorsten von Eicken, CTO and founder of RightScale, shares his insights on the advantages of deploying in the cloud. Discussion topics include design, implementation, and management considerations for cloud-based apps.

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This is the second of two episodes where we learn the basics of Load Testing our web applications. In this episode we take a look at autobench, a tool that automates our httperf load tests, then we’ll figure out how to visualize our httperf results in a graph, and finally take a brief look at a few other Load Testing tools you might want to get familiar with.

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One way to measure the scalability of your Rails application is to use Load Testing. This is the first of two screencasts where we attempt to give an introduction to load testing and show how to use two of the most basic Load Testing tools, Apache Bench and httperf.

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An interview in 3 parts with Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko of Heroku from their recent visit to New Relic. They discuss the vision behind the creation of Heroku, their passion for helping developers create scalable, high-performance Rails apps in the cloud, taking full advantage of cloud deployment, and their tips and best practices to create a high-performance app.

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Rails 2.3 shipped with Rack support and contains a set of middleware libraries which can be used to customize and optimize your Rails application. In this screencast we go over the basics of Rack & Rack Middleware, walk through the Rails Rack stack, and show how to optimize certain actions in your Rails application using Metal.

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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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Change is a constant in software development. Requirements change and there’s always more than one way to solve any problem. Team members join in, and depart - some senior, some junior. How do teams continue to make meaningful progress and ultimately complete projects with a shifting landscape? Wolfram Arnold from RubyFocus discusses the importance of leadership with Edward Hieatt and Davis Frank of Pivotal Labs.

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When talking about scalability we often mean hardware or software. However, a key aspect of software projects is the human factor. It’s also a key expense. Wolfram Arnold at RubyFocus - a boutique Ruby-on-Rails consulting and talent acquisition firm - investigates what it takes to scale your development team. A scalable team is one that can remain productive regardless of the variations in workload and team composition. In this episode, Wolfram interviews executives from Pivotal Labs, the leading agile development firm. Together they discuss the keys to creating a successful, scalable team. Whether you’re part of a large team or working on your own with clients, you will discover some valuable insights in these discussions.

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Jim walks us through connecting a local development environment to a remote production database. Doing this allows you to accurately reproduce bugs and test new features against real production data.

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Jim Gochee is the VP of Engineering at New Relic, where he’s helped shape RPM, their server monitoring tool. After asking him his recommendations for Scaling Rails, we take a closer look at some of the advanced features of New Relic’s RPM tool. If you haven’t seen some of the upper tier performance monitoring features of RPM, prepared to be impressed.

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Jesse Newland works at Rails Machine, where he’s helped scale many Rails applications. In this episode we ask him for 3 tips to help us Scale our applications. We’re then going to take a closer look at one of his recommendations: how to properly deploy a Rails app.

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Once you have a firm grasp of the 3 header tags we talked about in the previous episode (max-age, etags, and last_modified) you can start to take advantage of reverse proxy caches. In this episode we let you know exactly what a proxy cache is, and how you might use it to effectively scale a dynamic website to millions of users.

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Once you’ve done all the server side caching you can possibly do, you might want to take a look back at the client side of things to do some advanced client-side caching.  In this episode we’ll show how to effectively use the max-age, etag, and last_modified helpers to scale your application.

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Taylor Weibley is the director of support at Engine Yard, where he’s seen plenty of poorly scaling Rails applications.  In this first interview he lets us know about three things we can do today to help our application performance.  After his interview I go through some common ways to Scale your Database layer.

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Most of the big Web 2.0 websites rely on memcached (pronounced "Memcache-Dee") to scale, even the ones not using Rails. In this screencast you’ll learn how easy it is to use memcached in your Rails application, and how to do low level query caching for websites where you have highly customized layouts.

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If there’s no way to cache the entire content of a page, then odds are you can probably cache smaller pieces of it.  This is where fragment caching comes in, allowing you to cache common parts of a webpage which are resource intensive and may be used accross mulitple pages.

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If you can’t fully page cache your Rails action, when your next best choice is using Action Caching.  Action Caching allows you to run filters such as authorization on each request before they’re able to see the cached content of the page.

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Page caching is pretty simple to do, but what happens when you need pagination or dynamic data on your pages? Can you still use page caching? In this screencast we’ll start out showing how to solve these problems and finish up with my first rant of the series "Login status is overrated."

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Greg Nokes brings more than 3 years of Rails experience to bear to help dozens of Engine Yard’s Rails users every week with application configuration, deployment and performance issues. He has probably seen it all when it comes to Rails performance. We asked Greg to share his observations on a number of topics including: What should eCommerce app developers especially focus on? What should User Generated Content app developers especially focus on? When should I consider adding hosts or upgrading hardware? What database suggestions do you have for non-DBA’s? Check it out!

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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.

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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.

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Ruby on Rails comes with several caching mechanisms out of the box, starting with Page Caching. In this episode we show how to implement Page Caching in a simple blog application.

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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.

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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

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