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As an application grows it starts taking care of more and more work. At some point the first task comes that needs to be processed in background and one of the usual suspects for ruby is sidekiq. Now, did it ever happen to you that you get it all up and running on the server and next thing you know it's down and you get error reports that stuff ain't working? Meet monit, a tool that'll let you get ahead of trouble. It automatically restarts programs when down and can even send emails upon failures. Install monit Depending on your package manager this may differ: apt-get install monit yum install monit brew install monit Configure monit Edit  /etc/monit.conf or  /etc/monitrc Uncomment(or add) these lines: set httpd port 2812 and use address localhost allow localhost Add sidekiq entry Create the file /etc/monit.d/sidekiq.monitrc with: check process sidekiq_application_production0 with pidfile /path/to/shared/tmp/pids/side...

While using the spreadsheet gem to export data to a Microsoft Excel file I encountered various problems and lack of proper documentation forced me to dig pretty deep. So here are a few tips you might find useful. The gem works with a workbook object and worksheets in this workbook. To get started: workbook = Spreadsheet::Workbook.new sheet1 = workbook.create_worksheet name: worksheetname To write a row of data as usually is done in reports you can use: sheet1.row(1).replace [ 'col1', 'col2', 'col3'] Rows and Columns are 0 based, so col1 would be printed on A2 (Excel coords). Now to the beauty of it all, formatting, first of all, create a format: bold = Spreadsheet::Format.new :weight => :bold bold20 = Spreadsheet::Format.new :weight => :bold, size: 20 nobold20 = Spreadsheet::Format.new size: 20 bold_grey_bg = Spreadsheet::Format.new pattern_bg_color: :cyan, weight: :bold, pattern: 1, pattern_fg_color: :black Use :weight to set bold,...

Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Yeah, it's about timing. There was a problem in one of our projects at moove-it related to slow processing. There is a daemon spawning new threads to process certain new entries to the database. The entries come from a different system, that's the reason for this program which processes each new entry. Sometimes at certain hours of a day there are peaks in the entries to the database and the process will fall behind by about 20.000 entries or more. So we started analyzing the code to understand what was happening and why it took so long. We noted that each new thread the daemon spawned took about 5 seconds to complete its task. As we narrowed the measurement we came up with some code that took 5 seconds to execute but it only involved access to the database. So thanks to Aaron Patterson's ( @tenderlove ) talk at RubyConf Uruguay about "Who makes the best asado" where he talked about rails and how it manages threads ...