Some of the best ways to make your Rails app faster are dead-simple and quite often missed. The tragic part is that many of these problems come up over and over again and can be fixed quickly and incrementally. And the benefits of each of these improvements can be significant.…
The latest beta version of the Skylight gem adds support for Sinatra apps. We've gotten a lot of requests for Sinatra support, and we're happy to finally get it out to users for testing. Our Sinatra support is as good as it gets: we of course…
Skylight learns how your app is performing by running an agent that instruments each request as it comes in. Built with efficiency in mind, our new Featherweight agent is now almost invisible, making it usable in even the most resource-constrained environments. Keeping our overhead low is extremely important, because it…
One of the coolest features of Rust is how it automatically manages resources for you, while still guaranteeing both safety (no segfaults) and high performance. Because Rust is a different kind of programming language, it might be difficult to understand what I mean, so let me be perfectly clear: * In…
Last week at GoGaRuCo, I talked about how Rust bends the performance/safety curve and enables a whole new generation of high-level programmers to become systems-level programmers. That tradeoff loomed large when we started building Skylight. We knew that we wanted to process high-fidelity traces of every request, in order…
