Self Help University » Talks

Nighttime Story: Learning From Early Success of One Thousand and One Rails Ap…

admin — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 14:23:10 +0000

Google Tech Talks
July, 17 2008

ABSTRACT

Three companies recently collaborated to use DTrace, a powerful open source process introspection tool to find and fix a substantial Rails latency issue.

Teams from Joyent and Twitter and DTrace developer Bryan Cantrill from Sun joined forces to spend a day looking in detail at how Ruby processes behave within a Rails production environment. The purpose of the collaboration was to use the dynamic tracing framework to fix a latency issue observed in Twitter. DTrace is one of the components of the open source project OpenSolaris. It is designed for forensic investigation of processes, and as such is perfectly suited for the inspection and monitoring of Ruby processes running Rails applications.

During their analysis, the joint team discovered that the raising and catching of particular set of exceptions within Rails caused large amounts of CPU time to be consumed generating back-traces hundreds of frames long. Through the detection and removal of these exceptions, the latency of a particular class of Rails request-response cycles was substantially improved.

Joyent CTO and co-founder Jason Hoffman is vocal about the benefits of DTrace:

We use DTrace all the time in identifying performance issues in our customer’s and in our own applications.

However, he believes that there is still room for improvement, and that the introspection into Ruby processes that DTrace offers is still not deep enough. Patches for versions 1.8.5 and 1.8.6 of Ruby are currently being worked on that will afford DTrace with an even greater ability to peer inside Ruby’s internals. Jason also believes that DTrace will continue to generate a tremendous amount of insight into production Rails and Ruby processes. With ports in development for FreeBSD and planned for OS X Leopard, DTrace is no longer an exclusive tool for Solaris users.

Interestingly, not only is this a success story for open source tools being used to improve open source frameworks, it is also a success story for the process of open source software development. Within 11 hours of a ticket being filed, it had been accepted by Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson himself, and incorporated into the latest version of Rails for immediate use.

Speaker: Jason Hoffman
Jason A. Hoffman is a founder and the CTO of Joyent, an on-demand infrastructure and cloud computing company that serves billions of page views and traffics hundreds of millions of emails per month.

Joyent is dedicated to the singular mission that developers should be able to start at a small scale and flex to a global scale with minimal friction. Joyent is among the world’s largest OpenSolaris installations and while supporting all unix-based languages and data stores, Joyent’s products have included the first production support of Ruby on Rails, inclusion of the ZFS file system, and Joyent’s DTrace-enabled Ruby ships on MacOS X Leopard and soon on OpenSolaris.

Jason is a systems scientist with BS and MS degrees from UCLA, and a PhD from UCSD, and is an expert in scalable architectures. He has applied his knowledge and experience from the Web to Games to Computational Chemistry, Proteomics and Cancer biology.

Duration : 1:33:51

Kary Mullis’ next-gen cure for killer infection

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:45:25 +0000

http://www.ted.com Drug-resistant bacteria kills, even in top hospitals. But now tough infections like staph and anthrax may be in for a surprise. Nobel-winning chemist Kary Mullis, who watched a friend die when powerful antibiotics failed, unveils a radical new cure that shows extraordinary promise.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the “Sixth Sense” wearable tech, and “Lost” producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

Duration : 0:5:9

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s minds

admin — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:03:17 +0000

http://www.ted.com Sensing the motives and feelings of others is a natural talent for humans. But how do we do it? Here, Rebecca Saxe shares fascinating lab work that uncovers how the brain thinks about other peoples’ thoughts — and judges their actions.

Duration : 0:16:52

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:31:29 +0000

http://www.ted.com Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure — and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.

Duration : 0:16:52

Richard St. John: Secrets of success in 8 words, 3 minutes

admin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 07:39:12 +0000

http://www.ted.com Why do people succeed? Is it because theyre smart? Or are they just lucky? Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes — including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

Duration : 0:3:47