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Firefighting an RSS Aggregator’s Performance
That’s a before-and-after shot of the database server’s CPU! I was watching it slowly creep up, planning to inspect it after some other work, before receiving mails from Linode that the virtual server...
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Rails Cache Sweeper Gotchas
As you’ll see here, Rails cache sweepers are a tricky subject. Here are some general things I’ve learned. Sweepers are dual creatures. “Here’s the scoop: sweepers observe both your models and your...
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Private resources with ElasticSearch and Tire
I’m adding private channels to Player FM and one consideration is search results. Tire’s activerecord does a great job at making updates transparent, but in this case some manual overriding is...
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Monkey-patching a sample() method in Rails
It’s useful while debugging to choose a random sample. Thus you can include something like this in application.rb or an initializer. Now you can say Post.sample to get a single post or Post.sample(5)...
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Testing HTTPS Locally
As I’m migrating the player over to HTTPS, one challenge is partial content, leading to an incomplete padlock and strikethrough domain warning like this: And the harsh but fair warning, upon...
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Defer and Recur with Rails, Redis, and Resque
I’ve put off some scaling related issues about as long as possible, and am now proceeding to introduce a deferred-job stack. I’ll explain what I’ve learned so far, and with the caveat: this isn’t in...
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Logging an error with Exceptional
Here’s a quick utility for people using Exceptional to track errors. It lets you force an exception to be logged and without having to rescue it. Example: exceptional “read_file”, “file not found” The...
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Load-balancing Rails with Nginx
Well this was some fine undocumented black magic. I’ve got Player FM behind a load balancer now, using the following Nginx config. I’ll explain some more about the overall upgrade later. # App load...
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How to use different favicons for development, staging, and production
It’s useful to have different favicons for each environment during development, as Pamela recently pointed out. Here’s how I do it. First, generate the images. Most graphics editor have some kind of...
View ArticleSpeeding up Rails tests with Spring
I found Rails tests were running slow, these things helped. Instrumenting application.rb First, I added some logging to application.rb ruby < view plain text > def logg(m) puts "#{DateTime.now}...
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