Relentless Simplicity :: The Bonanzle Tech Blog

I did not find anything to love about the results I was getting searching for queries like “Increase rubymine memory” and “set rubymine memory”. Here’s the location of the file that dictates Rubymine memory usage in my Ubuntu install:

[RUBYMINE_DIRECTORY]/bin/rubymine.vmoptions

Inside you can specify lines like:

-Xms800m
-Xmx1200m
-XX:MaxPermSize=1000m
-ea

These declare maximum memory usage, maximum sustained memory usage, and, uh, some other stuff.

[Hops onto soapbox]
I love Rubymine, but I sometimes wish that instead of adding a ridiculous number of new features, they’d just make the damn thing run consistently fast, and not make me worry about memory usage. I know that with my web site I always have a preference toward adding cool new stuff, but responsible thing to do is often to perfect the pieces that are already there. Almost everything negative I’ve heard about Rubymine (which isn’t all that much) is along this same vein, but I’ve never heard the Rubymine team admit that it wishes that the product ran faster or its memory management were better.
[Hops back down]

For my money, still definitely the best choice for Linux IDEs.

Bill Uncategorized Rails

Since we first signed up with New Relic about six months ago, they’ve impressed me with the constant stream of features that they have added to their software on a monthly basis. When we first signed up, they were a pretty vanilla monitoring solution, and impressed me little more than FiveRuns had previously. They basically let you see longest running actions sorted by average time consumed, and they let you see throughput, but beyond that, there was little reason to get excited at the time.

Since then, they’ve been heaping on great additions. First, they added a new view (requested by yours truly, amongst others) that let actions be sorted not just by the average time taken, but by the arguably more important “Time taken * times called,” which tends to give a better bang-per-buck idea of where optimization time should be spent.

They’ve also been rearranging which features are available at which levels, which has made “Silver” level a much more tempting proposition, with both the “Controller Summary” (described last paragraph) and “Transaction Traces,” which allows you to see which specific database calls are taking longest to complete.

But by far my favorite New Relic feature added is their brand new “Apdex” feature. If you’re a busy web programmer or operator, the last thing you want to do is spend time creating subjective criteria to prioritize which parts of your application should be optimized first. You also don’t want to spend time determining when, exactly, an action has become slow enough that it warrants optimization time. Apdex provides a terrific way to answer both of these prickly, subjective questions, and it does it in typical New Relic fashion — with a very coherent and readable graphical interface.

I’ve included some screenshots of the Apdex for one of our slower actions at right.  These show (from top to bottom) the actions in our application; ordered from most to least “dissatisfying,” the performance breakdown of one of our more dissatisfying actions; and the degree to which this action has been dissatisfying today, broken down by hour, and put onto a color coded scale that ranges from “Excellent” (not dissatisfying) down to poor. Apdex measures “dissatisfaction” as a combination of the number of times that a controller action has been “tolerable” (takes 2-8 seconds to complete) and “frustrating” (takes more than 8 seconds to complete).

New Relic is to be commended for tackling an extremely subjective problem (when and where to optimize) and creating a very sensible, objective framework through which to filter that decision.  Bravo, guys.  Now, hopefully after Railsconf they can spend a couple hours running Apdex on their Apdex window, since the rendering time for the window generally falls into their “dissatisfaction” range (greater than 8 seconds)  

But I’m more than willing to cut them some slack for an addition this useful (and this new).

Bill Rails apdex, new relic, performance, Rails

Last week, as part of getting Bloggity rolling with the key features of Wordpress, I realized that we needed to allow the user to upload images without doing a page reload.  Expecting a task as ordinary as this would be well covered by Google, I dutifully set out in search of “rails ajax uploading” and found a bunch of pages that either provided code that simply didn’t work, or claims that it couldn’t be done without a Rails plugin.

Not so.  If you use jQuery and the jQuery-form plugin.

The main challenge in getting a AJAX uploading working is that the standard remote_form_for doesn’t understand multipart form submission, so it’s not going to send the file data Rails seeks back with the AJAX request.   That’s where the jQuery form plugin comes into play.  Here’s the Rails code for it:

<% remote_form_for(:image_form, :url => { :controller => "blogs", :action => :create_asset }, :html => { :method => :post, :id => 'uploadForm', :multipart => true }) do |f| %>
 Upload a file: <%= f.file_field :uploaded_data %>
<% end %>

Here’s the associated Javascript:

$('#uploadForm input').change(function(){
 $(this).parent().ajaxSubmit({
  beforeSubmit: function(a,f,o) {
   o.dataType = 'json';
  },
  complete: function(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus) {
   // XMLHttpRequest.responseText will contain the URL of the uploaded image.
   // Put it in an image element you create, or do with it what you will.
   // For example, if you have an image elemtn with id "my_image", then
   //  $('#my_image').attr('src', XMLHttpRequest.responseText);
   // Will set that image tag to display the uploaded image.
  },
 });
});

And here’s the Rails controller action, pretty vanilla:

 @image = Image.new(params[:image_form])
 @image.save
 render :text => @image.public_filename

As you can see, all quite straightforward with the help of jQuery. I’ve been using this for the past few weeks with Bloggity, and it’s worked like a champ.

Bill Rails ajax, attachment_fu, image, jquery, Rails, upload

We are on the cusp of having Passenger running, but I am paranoid, based on our Mongrel experiences, of Passenger instances leaking memory up the wazoo and eventually exhausting our system resources.  With Mongrel, we’ve used monit to ensure that memory usage remains intact with each Mongrel, but I hadn’t found a straightforward way to do the same with Phusion yet.  So I’m improvising:

kill $(passenger-memory-stats | grep '[56789]..\.. MB.*Rails’ | awk ‘{ print $1 }’)

This single line (run via crontab) ought to do what our thousand line monit config file used to do:  kill off Rails processes that exceed 500 MB.  From my testing so far, it seems to do the trick.

I have verified that it does indeed kill one or multiple Rails processes started by Passenger if their memory usage is reported as being a three digit number that starts with 5-9.  Obviously if a Rails instance were able to jump past the 500-999 MB range in less time than the frequency of our cron task, that would be a problem.

Will report back once I’ve witnessed it at work in the wild.

Update from the wild: Yes, it works.

Bill Rails memory, monit, passenger, Rails

Rails programmer, how long do you think these glory days will last?

I first started thinking about this while attending Railsconf and talking to programmers who were creating Rails projects within gorillas such as AOL, LinkedIn, Monster, and of course Yellowpages (my apologies to AOL, LinkedIn, and Monster if any of those projects were supposed to be secret). After watching DHH’s keynote, it sunk in further. Now I hear that EngineYard just got $15m more funding, and the picture is crystal clear: the hobgoblins from years’ past that have kept Rails away from corporate use are melting away faster than polar ice cap.

This is a bad thing for those that like the competitive advantage Rails affords. With the advantage of RoR (and two tablespoons of Firebug), right now is one of those rare times in which a motivated programmer or two can compete technologically with legacy web companies that have payrolls 100x greater.

If Bonanzle could dig up an ounce of business savvy (still TBD) to go with our technology, I like to think we could be one of the seminal examples of this. Look down the list of our technological advantages vs the gorillas (real time offer making, integration with all major IM clients, image cropper, price guessers, pretty urls, 0-page-load item creation, real time messaging built into site, item importers for eBay/Craigslist, etc. etc.), and it’s clear that we’re living in an age where the possibilities for the underdog are as rife as ever.

But how long will that be the case? With a test-driven development environment like Rails, where metaprogramming and a solid MVC architecture can cut 125,000 lines of code to 20,000 lines (like Yellowpages did in moving to Rails), suddenly gorillas are nimbler, and order is restored to the world. Eventually, the gorillas might just figure this out. The horror.

In light of these facts, I have taken to pumping up the FUD on Rails whenever possible. I like my unfair Rails advantage, and would miss it if it were gone. In the interests of helping the reader perpetuate Rails FUD amongst their own social circle, I have created the following collection of sound bites to help you desecrate Rails:

1. Rails Doesn’t Scale. C’mon, you know it’s true. I even preached this one myself. Tell them that “Ruby is the slowest programming language” ever. I mean, it’s slower than an excellent language like Python by a factor of 3x. It’s slower than C by about 70x! I can only imagine how much slower it is than x80 assembly. Visualize how screaming fast your assembly-driven site could be. If your listener happens to mention cloud computing, I recommend you retort with the thousands of dollars they’d have to spend on a server cloud for a heavily trafficked site. If they point out that those costs are a fraction of the development costs they’d incur otherwise, move on to point number two.
2. No Big Sites Use Rails. Yes… yes… yes! In Rails’ history, excluding a couple one shot wonders like YellowPages and Twitter (don’t forget: Twitter is rumored to be leaving Rails), no “big” web site is running on Rails. Point out that both Facebook and Flickr run on PHP. Or better still, perhaps your listener would like to literally be the next MySpace and build on .NET? Hopefully they do not retort that almost none of the biggest sites were built when Rails existed, or that most new sites are built on RoR, or that any kind of bad Rails juju they encountered could be monkey patched since it’s all open source. It should suffice to say that if no big site has been built on Rails by now, no big site ever will be. Still not dissuaded?
3. Google uses Python. Yes, they also use Ruby. But they use Python more. This one ought to work well when convincing a take-over-the-world CEO.
4. Other Languages have More Libraries. This works sort of like number two… point out how many libraries PHP already has. Or .Net. Or Java, or C++. You can manipulate the hell out of an image with any of these choices. Or if you decided at the last minute that you wanted to make your web site into a PS3 game, you’d be glad you chose C++ and its PS3 libraries. Only the savviest enterprise-y tech guy will be able to discern between quantity and quality: think how many underdeveloped, crap libraries they’ve become accustomed to while dealing with Java.
5. Open Source Software is Unsupported Software or Ruby on Rails Doesn’t Deploy on Windows or URLs Don’t Matter. Alright, if they still weren’t convinced after four points that terrific, you’re going to need to fire some scattershot. These arguments should close the case for the last few Windows types, and for others, hopefully they tilt in favor of Anything But RoR. But for the last few hard-to-budge listeners, you’ll need to pull out your ace in the hole…
6. The Creator is an Ass. Have you ever listened to DHH talk? What an elitist snob. Thinks he is God’s gift to programming. The way he repeatedly cut off this nice Python fellow was disrespectful. Any framework created by this guy must be an elitist, disrespectful framework to use.

And that should about do it… double bonus points for anyone who can convince eBay to give ASP .NET a whirl!

(Note to busy/dense readers:  #1-6 employ heavy use of irony)

Bill Rails, Rants Rails