New Relic announced that 37signals—the company behind Ruby on Rails—uses their Ruby on Rails performance management solution RPM to keep the performance of their applications humming.
Since April 2008, 37signals has relied on New Relic RPM to standardize performance management for all its applications. With New Relic, 37signals isolates and fixes any performance problems fast—before customers find them. "After we installed New Relic, we learned that Highrise [their web based CRM] response times were considerably higher on a few key actions than we'd like," said Rails inventor and 37signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson. "We spent some time optimizing and confirmed through RPM that we had achieved a 50% speedup on those key actions."
We wanted to know, if their findings led to changes in Rails. David Heinemeier Hansson answered:
None of the findings caused any changes in Rails. It was merely pointing out that we were doing some inefficient things, which once highlighted were obvious to rectify. I don't have any more information than we received an overall 50% speedup on those affected actions.
More information, including an interview with Lew Cirne—New Relic's CEO—can be found in this InfoQ article on Rails performance analysis with New Relic.
Rails developers can try RPM for free, and upgrade to a paid subscription when the application enters production.