Three years ago, we were part way through the process of moving all of our servers and infrastructure from a single colocation facility to a multiple availability zone Amazon virtual private cloud. Things were going well and the business was booming, but we had a major problem. The old Storage Area Network (disk drive system shared by many of our servers) was going to run out of capacity in a matter of months.
Read MoreRuby is known for being bad at garbage collection. The truth is that the default GC settings aren't very good for a Rails application so if you run a Rails app you really should do some tuning (this requires either Ruby Enterprise or Ruby 1.9.2). Here's a streamlined process for getting started: Get a Baseline Turn on collecting GC stats for New Relic (of course you're using New Relic). You want to know what you're fixing and this will probably...
Read MoreThree Things that Work Great Together If you use Chef and Nagios, you already know what a great combination they make. As you build new servers they automatically start getting monitored by Nagios. Without you having to do anything they're grouped together based on role, so its easy to apply the same checks for all servers in a given role. If you haven't tried Nagios built with the chef cookbook its easy to get started with this guide from Opscode....
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