Performance monitoring, roadmapping, and support.
100% managed by Speedshop.

Do you ever stare at your APM dashboard and wonder: what the hell did I install this for? You don't understand 90% of the numbers, and if you were asked to find important metrics such as time spent waiting on GC, time spent waiting on I/O, the 95th percentile latency of your external services, or others, you wouldn't have any idea where to even start.

Does it feel like you don't know where to start?

You know you want to improve the performance of your Ruby web application. Perhaps customers are complaining, or churning out because they feel like they're "too big" for your platform these days. You've got a solid product engineering team, but maybe you don't feel like your operational chops are quite there yet. In any case, you'd rather that your current engineers focus on delivering features, and only spend the minimal amount of time on perf work required to put out the fires and move on.

Or, maybe you feel like the lights just aren't staying on. Every time a new big client gets brought on, or an influx of traffic hits the app, everything starts to "brown out" like the local power plant just fizzled in and out. You might have a bandaid for today, but why does this keep happening?

Have you ever felt like every time you actually tried to fix a performance problem, it was like quicksand for your engineers? Days become weeks, weeks may even become months, and yet there's no concrete progress, and customers are still complaining?

Replicating a proven playbook at your business

From 2022 to 2024, Speedshop was able to reduce page load times at Gusto by over 40% across the entire application. That's a massive improvement for a multi-billion dollar business with hundreds of Rails engineers. For businesses of any size, we can take the relevant parts of that proven process and bring it to your organization.

There are three critical components to any successful performance effort:

1. Extensive and correct instrumentation. You need to have the tooling and observability installed correctly and measuring the numbers which need to be measured. It goes far beyond just adding an APM to your Gemfile and calling it a day.
2. Sufficient performance skills. Speedshop has taught hundreds of Rails developers how to optimize Rails apps, through workshops, books, and on-site training. Through this ongoing service, we can provide targeted training where required.
3. Clear technical direction. Metrics are good, but you need to turn them into concrete work: stories, tickets, or whatever your existing system is, we'll turn performance metrics into work that needs to be done, and provide context on priority and difficulty of implentation.

This service provides all three.

What does the service entail?

This is a monthly retainer that embeds a staff-level engineer in your organization for the purpose of optimizing performance and scalability.

You'll give Speedshop access to your performance metric provider, such as New Relic, Skylight or Scout, and any other server metrics. We'll also need read (not write) access to your source code. We'll discuss your particular performance needs - need a tuneup for the frontend or backend (or both)? Do you have memory issues? Are a few particular workers or controller actions cramping your style?

Once that's done, here's what we provide:

1. Performance monitoring and roadmap management, 100% managed by Speedshop. Monitoring performance issues, creating tickets/roadmaps or otherwise "scoping work" based on these, will no longer be your problem. You should feel like the assessment of perf related concerns and identification of "what needs fixing and how to do it" is no longer on your plate. You'll also know that any perf work you do will actually be successful and have customer impact - no more barking up the wrong tree for weeks on end and ending up with half-solutions.
2. Setup of automated alerts and dashboards.
3. Monthly reporting with comments from Nate.
4. Performance fixes for small issues. This covers things that would take us a day of work or less, like fixing a particular N+1. Larger projects can be done on an hourly basis, beyond the retainer fee.
5. Unlimited pull request review for perf-related work.
6. Unlimited async access for perf-related issues via Slack/team chat.
7. Your entire team will get access to all of my written products and books plus the Rails Performance Workshop, a $600 value per person.

Let's get started.

This ongoing retainer service is available for $3,000 USD, monthly. Contracts are a six-month term.

Currently, there are 3 out of 5 slots available for this service. Availability is first come first serve.

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