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 Ra...

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 m...

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.

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 w...

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 Data...

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.

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

"Batch and offline processing is a fact of life for many of us, and by its nature it often comes with deadlines and windows for processing. Sometimes the only way to make that deadline is to take a large job and throw more hardware at it. Unfortunately things aren't always that easy, and this present...