FiveRuns Blog

As we’ve worked with our customers, our partners, and the community over the past couple of years we have gathered lots of tips, tricks, and best practices around Rails application performance, administration, and deployment. We’ve heard the message loud and clear – people are looking for help in speeding up their apps – so we are happy to announce two new services offerings to fit the bill: Performance Optimization and Deployment Readiness.

Now, you can call us in to help you tune-up, fix-up and scale-up your Rails applications so that you can get all the performance and scale that your application and business demands. We’ll deliver these services directly, or through one of our development partners, whichever works best for you.

We’re also happy to announce that we have partnered with Relevance, a leading consulting, development, and training company that is focused on Ruby on Rails, to deliver the new services as part of their consulting engagements. Relevance clients will be offered the FiveRuns performance optimization and deployment readiness services as well as use of FiveRuns Manage and TuneUp performance monitoring software products as part of their Relevance engagement.

From Justin Gehtland, president of Relevance: “Relevance specializes in delivering agile Ruby on Rails application development and training services to our customers. FiveRuns’ expertise in optimizing application performance prior to deployment and continually monitoring it while in production expands the scope of our services, provides significant value to our customers, and enables us to better meet their application development needs.”

And the results are encouraging. TradeKing, a nationally licensed online broker dealer and pioneer in incorporating social networking features into online trading, worked with us to optimize the performance of their website using the new services.

From Mike Massey, director of community development at TradeKing: “Rails has made it easy for us to develop our applications quickly and beautifully, but understanding how they will perform has been somewhat of a black hole. FiveRuns’ extensive experience in Rails application performance coupled with their monitoring and profiling tools have helped us increase the performance of our site by an order of magnitude and helped ensure the best online trading experience for our customers.”

Here are the details of the new offerings:

FiveRuns Rails Performance Optimization Service. We’ll do a full review of your Rails application and the production environment to help pinpoint performance bottlenecks, optimize the stack and production configuration and prepare for future scale. As part of this service, we will:

• Identify problem areas and candidates for performance improvement, and suggest a plan for improvement
• Find and fix performance bottlenecks (or assist you in fixing them)
• Suggest changes to your application or environment that will increase performance overall
• Determine target performance thresholds
• If desired, set up, customize and train your staff on the FiveRuns TuneUp and Manage services including production monitoring reports, alerts and triggers for your Rails application stack
• Create customized performance reports for the application

FiveRuns Rails Deployment Readiness Service. This service is designed to ensure successful application performance, on even the most aggressive application deployment schedules. We’ll include analysis of the desired performance characteristics of your application and the Rails stack components on which it runs. We will also:

• Determine target performance thresholds for the application
• Stress test the application
• Identify performance bottlenecks and provide optimization guidelines
• Assess your target deployment environment (Rails stack components, infrastructure, and providers) and suggest improvements and ideas to meet the application’s performance objectives
• If desired, install and configure FiveRuns TuneUp and Manage products on the your development and QA systems for ongoing performance monitoring

We’re also happy to put together custom services to address performance scale problems you are having with your Rails applications.

So, if you have a performance problem that needs addressing, we’d love to work with you on it. More details on the services can be found here. Or, just shoot us a note and we’ll be in touch.