18 Dec 2019
I maintain an internal-facing service at Heroku that does metadata processing. It’s not real-time, so there’s plenty of slack for when things go wrong. Recently I discovered that the system was getting bogged down to the point where no jobs were being executed at all. After hours of debugging, I found the problem was an UPDATE on a single row on a single table was causing the entire table to lock, which caused a lock queue and ground the whole process to a halt. This post is a story about how the problem was debugged and fixed and why such a seemingly simple query caused so much harm.
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06 Nov 2019
Why on earth does my memory consumption chart look like that? It’s a question I hear every week. To help answer that question, I wrote a Web server request simulator to model how Ruby uses memory over time, though it applies to other languages as well. We will use the output of that project to dissect why a web app’s memory would be expected to look like this:
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12 Jul 2019
For quite some time we’ve received reports from our larger customers about a mysterious H13 - Connection closed error showing up for Ruby applications. Curiously it only ever happened around the time they were deploying or scaling their dynos. Even more peculiar, it only happened to relatively high scale applications. We couldn’t reproduce the behavior on an example app. This is a story about distributed coordination, the TCP API, and how we debugged and fixed a bug in Puma that only shows up at scale.
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26 Jun 2019
Here’s the setup: You are a web server named Puma. You need to accept incoming connections and give them to your thread pool, but before we can get that far, you’ll have to make sure all of the request’s packets have been received so that it’s ready to be passed to a Rack app. This sounds like the job for a Reactor!
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26 Oct 2018
Today I have an unusual proposition for you. I’m spending a bunch of time to try to get Beto elected to Texas Senate, so I’ve not been able to write as much technical content. Rather than slow down on my door knocking, I’m looking to pick up the pace, and I want you to do it with me. Starting today, I’m offering anyone who phone banks or “block walks” (knocks on doors) the opportunity to win some of my technical time. Here’s how it’s going to work.
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17 Oct 2018
Rails applications that use ActiveRecord objects in their cache may experience an issue where the entries cannot be invalidated if all of these conditions are true:
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09 Oct 2018
You might know rubocop as the linter that helps enforce your code styles, but did you know you can use it to make your code faster? In this post, we’ll look at static performance analysis and then at the end there’s a video of me live coding a PR that introduces a new performance cop to rubocop.
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19 Jun 2018
All previously released versions of Sprockets, the software that powers the Rails asset pipeline, contain a directory traversal vulnerability. This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2018-3760.
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11 May 2018
Rails 5.2 was just released last month with a major new feature: Active Storage. Active Storage provides file uploads and attachments for Active Record models with a variety of backing services (like AWS S3). While libraries like Paperclip exist to do similar work, this is the first time that such a feature has been shipped with Rails. At Heroku, we consider cloud storage a best practice, so we’ve ensured that it works on our platform. In this post, we’ll share how we prepared for the release of Rails 5.2, and how you can deploy an app today using the new Active Storage functionality.
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30 Apr 2018
Before you can understand how to build a parser using parslet, you need to understand why you might want to. In my case I have a library called rundoc it allows anyone to write documentation that can be “run”. For example, someone might write docs that had this:
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