Reviewing Application Health with HAProxy Stats 0

Posted by val
on Thursday, March 27
One of the methods we use for checking the health of our applications is stats collected from HAProxy. We utilize it to see how many requests are scheduled for execution on mongrel instances. The graph is one indication of how our applications perform. When we launched the new version of the site three weeks ago, the graph for a single vertical (ReadingSocial) on a typical Tuesday looked like this:
So, between porting all verticals to Myspace, Orkut, Bebo, and enhancing the functionality, we spent some time on optimization. In addition to analyzing slow-query logs with mysqlsla, Aaron wrapped all external API calls (and we do a lot of them - to Amazon, Facebook, Myspace, etc) in slow monitoring so we could see where the latest external bottleneck was so we could fix it one by one. Three weeks later the graph became much more peaceful:

JRuby trunk == better/faster Rails performance 0

Posted by aaron
on Saturday, November 03

So I remember a couple months ago playing with JRuby, and while fibonacci was super fast, Rails was way off.. ActiveRecord performance 6x-10x slower than MRI...

Looks like its getting better. Disclaimer: These are really really simple non-scientific tests.

Local mysql database, MYISAM, table people, with 2 columns, (id, name). 100k rows

> jruby -J-server -O script/console production
>> Benchmark.measure {10000.times {Person.find :first}}.total
=> 2.286
> ./script/console production
>>  Benchmark.measure {10000.times {Person.find :first}}.total
=> 1.7
Mongrel
> ab -n 1000 http://localhost:3001/people/1
Requests per second:    95.02 [#/sec] (mean)
On Glassfish v3 with: RAILS_ENV=production jruby -J-server -O -S glassfish_rails glass2, after a bit of warmup. 
> ab -n 1000 http://localhost:8080/glass2/people/1
Requests per second:    48.25 [#/sec] (mean)

turning logging mostly off

> ab -n 1000 http://localhost:8080/glass2/people/1
Requests per second:    56.70 [#/sec] (mean)
All in all, thats impressive. Congrats to Charles, Ola, and the whole JRuby crew. I dont think i'll be putting this in production yet, but I'm very interested to hear from others that have.