Video > Mashable Conversations > A Conversation With New Relic's Lew Cirne

From: Mashable Conversations Add A Tag New Relic, Inc. is an organization not only dedicated to disproving the myth that Ruby on Rails as a web development environment can't scale, but also an organization involved in developing tools to assist in scalability and bringing them to the developer landscape. This afternoon, New Relic comes out of stealth status with the grand announcement of $3.5 million in first-round venture financing from Benchmark Capital. I had a chance to speak to founder and CEO of New Relic, Lew Cirne, a bit about his organization and exactly where these rumors of unscalability come from. For most of us here at Mashable, the biggest, most well known application running on the Rails platform we can think of is Twitter - a tool hardly known for its stability. While this contributes to the mythology of the platform's instability, what really propagates it is a number of things. My theory was that because RoR is such an infant development environment, just like PHP experienced in its infancy, questions of its scalability come from the fact that every major landmark in terms of size applications cross over into lead to new questions, and there are very few folks with whom to turn to for answers.  While New Relic hopes to be one of those organizations to turn to, Lew told me that this isn't the only reason we see the common occurance of problems scaling for Rails applications. Rails is known for it's succinct programming style, where one line of code can be very powerful, and perform very complex tasks.  It's this simplicity that can also be a trap for developers who accidentally can trigger enormous processing tasks with what look like very efficient lines of code. New Relic's software as a service offering can analyze these code bits and give exact and graphed out details about what sort of computing time-sinks may exist within the code, and offer suggestions of more efficient ways of executing that same statement. All in all, it's a very interesting proposition - if you're a developer in the Rails environment (or anyone curious about how Rails applications work behind the scenes), you definitely want to catch this episode, as Lew drops some very interesting knowlege on the topic.