Post-mortem on New Relic's Move to Ruby 1.9 | Hacker News Reader

Post-mortem on New Relic's Move to Ruby 1.9

blog.newrelic.com

25 pointswhalesalad15 comments

Hey, "post-mortem" means "after death" in Latin. Maybe we should start introducing some variety, for example the much more accurate "post-facto"?

It's kinda weird clicking on an article about the "post-mortem" analysis of a startup launch to find out it's doing good after all :)

I can only guess at what horrors lie below New Relic's calm waters that it took them 8 months to convert their code to 1.9. It's not that different! I have generally flipped over to 1.9 as part of Rails 3 upgrades, the rails part being far more work than the ruby part.

What on earth were you doing that took so long? Is it because NR's requirement to parse a lot of log files, so the changes to strings had outsize impact?

You're right, it's not that different - what killed us was unsupported gems that were wired deeply into our system, along with operations weaknesses that made changing ruby versions extremely challenging.

We took extra time to refactor those weaknesses out, so future changes like this one will be much simpler.

Incidentally, we don't parse log files - our agents send Thrift, JSON, and Ruby Marshaled data. String changes affected us a little bit, but the vast majority of the code in that tier is Java anyway. Only the front-end code is in Rails anymore.

Not sure 'Post-mortem' sets the right tone given the contents of the post.

As someone who watched the proceedings I can confirm that the only dead things were our interest in using Ruby 1.8 and a rather large slab of smoked meat.

Pretty standard terminology. circa 2006: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/the-project-postmor...

That's generally the term used when someone is looking back and writing about something.

Don't quote me on that though.

Not just "something", but something that has "died" or ceases to exist in its prior form and the "postmortem" is generally the detailed analysis of what happened.

Also, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/postmortem

The second definition given does not refer to "death" at all and is commonly used in science and business contexts. It usually refers to the project (or the "event") being over at the point of discussion.

The term is overloaded nowadays, as can be seen on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-mortem_%28disambiguation%2...

Now it typically connotes a post-event review using the metaphor of the autopsy.

"retrospective" is better.

You may be correct. I tend to use the term loosely when looking back on an event and discussing it. Regardless of whether it was good or bad.

I felt that their actual blog title, "Eating the 1.9 Elephant," didn't reflect the content of the post.

I always thought the 1.9 GC instrumentation was a little wonky. Glad they got that cleared up.

We had the same suspicion but only one customer had observed it repeatably in the wild. We turned out to be customer number two. :) If you're running 1.9, definitely get agent 3.5 as soon as you can.

Ha, no I was the agent developer who put the GC instrumentation in for 1.9 :) back in 'the day'

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