Proposal: Lobste.rs performance analysis with Nate Berkopec & Scout APM

Hey Lobsters!

I'm with Scout APM, and we're working with Nate Berkopec to do some free, in-depth performance audits of Rails open source projects. We've been talking with Peter (pushcx) about doing one for Lobste.rs, and we wanted to open it up to community discussion before going forward.

For us, this is a way to raise awareness of Rails performance issues and best practices, and to give back to the OSS community. We're covering the cost of Nate's time to work on these projects, and we'll release the audit publicly to the community to give some direction around optimizing the codebase.

On the Lobste.rs side, we'll submit a PR adding our monitoring gem to the codebase and will set up our config file with Peter independently. After the audit, only Lobste.rs admins will have access to the account, unless there is community interest in making that data public.

After about a week of gathering data, Nate will do the performance audit. We're going to record a screencast of him going through the codebase and debugging performance issues, and will also write up a document with notes and suggested next steps for optimization.

Regarding privacy, here are a few things to know about Scout:

• We don't send form data from an application back up to our servers unless it is explicitly added to the trace by calling something like Context.add(secret: params[:secret]), which it won't be.
• If there's potentially private info in query params (/foo?private_thing=secret) - the ?... part can get excluded, which we are happy to enable -- docs here.
• By default, Scout collects the URI and IP of a traced request. However for the sake of user privacy, we'll set the parameter to disable collection of remote IPs in the config -- docs here.

We'll keep this post open for a week for discussion, so let us know if you have any thoughts or questions!

Cheers, Casey