FiveRuns Blog

Since TuneUp was released in May, we’ve been thrilled by the interest we’ve seen from across the Ruby community. It’s become a day-to-day debugging, performance tuning, and communication tool for many Rails developers, and over the last few months the involvement of the community in improving the stability and usability of the plugin as an open source project, hosted on GitHub, has been tremendous. Thanks, everyone!

So, what’s next for TuneUp?

Over the last year or so the Ruby community has seen an explosion of new web frameworks. We all love Rails, but a little friendly competition is a good thing, right? At FiveRuns we’re first and foremost Rubyists, and we’ve been having a lot of fun playing with these alternatives and thinking about how we can support them in our products.

We’ve been especially interested in Merb, which has been steadily growing in popularity and stability, and has popped up in feature requests from our customers. We’ve talked to a number of shops that include Merb development in their bag of tricks, and support for Merb in TuneUp has been a frequent follow-up question after demos at Ruby user groups.

So, today we’re announcing FiveRuns TuneUp for Merb, direct from MerbCamp in San Diego and just in time for the official release of Merb 1.0.

Let’s take a peek.

TuneUp for Merb is packaged as a Merb Slice, and works with Merb v0.9.5 and higher (it might even work with previous versions). Installation and setup is easy (we love slices); in just a few steps you’ll see a panel above your application that will provide in-depth information on the current action.

Currently, TuneUp for Merb provides information on filters, renders, and DataMapper activity (let us know what other ORMs you’d like to see. Sequel? ActiveRecord?). You can see what proportion of time you’re spending in the model, view, or controller, as well as how long each step takes to execute, where it’s being called (with support to jump to those files in TextMate), and for DataMapper activity the SQL query that was executed and a detailed breakdown of the Query object. Even if you’re not focused on performance, the TuneUp panel is a powerful exploratory tool; as with the Rails version, we expect we’ll hear developers are using it for debugging just as often as they use it for tuning.

The TuneUp Community

Another thing about TuneUp that we’ve received a lot of great feedback on is its use as a communication tool. With a single click from the panel you can send up the same detailed information on an action to http://tuneup.fiveruns.com, where you can keep it private (just to save it), share it with specific people, or even make it public—where the entire community can help you solve problems.

How do I get it and install it?

Installation is easy – in just a few steps you can start seeing detailed performance metrics on your Merb app. It comes packaged as the fiveruns_tuneup_merb gem. The detailed instructions are on the TuneUp web site.

Once configured, you can instrument your local Merb applications with TuneUp. For further capabilities, like uploading and sharing of TuneUp runs via the TuneUp website, please create an account and add the API key from your profile page. Please help us grow the public TuneUp community by uploading runs, sharing them and participating in the discussions.

Open Source

Our commitment to open source is the same as always. GitHub is a fantastic service, and we’re happy to make fiveruns_tuneup_merb (and dependency fiveruns_tuneup_core) available for forking. The project is still in its infancy, is most certainly a beta, and any help you can provide on making it more stable by contributing code (or sending bug reports and feature requests to our support team at ) would be greatly appreciated.