New Relic Rocks!
July 15th, 2010
We’ve been using a performance monitoring service from New Relic for a while now – and it rocks!
What I like most about it is that even as a non-techie, I can understand the graphs it presents. Taking the above example, I can see that we have virtually no queue for web requests (the green bit). That means that we respond to visitors requesting Kyero.com pages very quickly.
The majority of the average response time (around 350ms) is down to the operating system (Ruby). You can see that our new database servers are flying and that we’re delivering pages from cache (MemCache) with very little delay.
That’s why we’re currently concentrating on upgrading to the latest version of Ruby on Rails (not a trivial task at all). Unfortunately, this requires us do a lot of interrelated stuff at the same time and calls to mind the infamous Yak Shaving story.
But I digress ..
The other thing I like about New Relic (and we’re only using their free version), is that they combine multiple servers and multiple ‘listeners’ into a single report. We have three physical front-end servers, each with eight processes waiting to respond to web requests, and New Relic does a great job of rolling-up these 24 services and producing a unified performance figure.
