13 Oct 2015
This is one of the most frequent questions I’m asked by Heroku Ruby customers: “How do I debug a memory leak?” Memory is important. If you don’t have enough of it, you’ll end up using swap memory and really slowing down your site. So what do you do when you think you’ve got a memory leak? What you’re most likely seeing is the normal memory behavior of a Ruby app. You probably don’t have a memory leak. We’ll work on fixing your memory problems in a minute, but we have to cover some basics first.
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30 Sep 2015
Have you ever wondered who out there is using a gem? Now there’s an easy way.
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06 Aug 2015
In a recent patch we improved Rails response time by >10%, our largest improvement to date. I’m going to show you how I did it, and introduce you to the tools I used, because.. who doesn’t want fast apps?
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20 Jul 2015
It started screaming for life. Sucking in air and yelling out with a beautiful pain. I couldn’t stop smiling.
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11 Jul 2015
Every program wants to live forever. What happens when a program is forced to exit before it’s done running, and why would we want to do that?
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11 May 2015
I’ve never met a developer who complained about code getting faster or taking up less RAM. In Ruby, memory is especially important, yet few developers know the ins-and-outs of why their memory use goes up or down as their code executes. This article will start you off with a basic understanding of how Ruby objects relate to memory use, and we’ll cover a few common tricks to speed up your code while using less memory.
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30 Apr 2015
When we moved into our house on the East Side, the interior walls were all supported by 1 inch thick long leaf pine. A builder looking at the material during a site visit casually mentioned he would make something out of it. This peaked my interests and
set me down my recent woodworking path. The only problem was that I didn’t have many tools.
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10 Apr 2015
“Why exactly is RubyGems slow?” is the question that more than one developer has asked, but few have bothered to do anything about. Recently @mfazekas took up the task for profiling an especially slow case using dtrace. This resulted in several high profile pull requests to improve performance and drop memory allocations. These in turn lead me to ask the question, just what is Rubygems doing that takes so long? The short answer is, way more than you ever thought; for the long answer, keep reading.
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08 Apr 2015
I first started getting casual emails “we’ve been looking over your GitHub and we are impressed” and it was validation for me. I enjoyed the attention. It made me feel powerful. I eventually realized that more than a few of those emails came from bots. It was algorithmic, robotic attention. But so what? It still felt good. Occasionally I would get an email from a startup CEO that was personalized beyond a doubt with calls out to specific things I had done. That felt better. Over the years though, these messages went from uplifting, to annoying. These recruiters wanted something from me, they wanted me. But what did I want?
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26 Feb 2015
This month marks my third year anniversary with Heroku. It’s the longest I’ve worked at a single company and has been the greatest single career move I’ve made to date.
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