Blog

A lot of people are wondering about the technical stack used by updown.io and more generaly by one-man tech companies. A while back (2016) I filled up this information on StackShare (https://stackshare.io/adrienjarthon/updown-io). I haven't kept it up-to-date and I don't like to have to maintain yet another third party documentation so it's unlikely I'll update it again. Though it changes very...

This investigation was surprising to me so I thought it would be interesting to share my findings and I hope you'll like it. Some of my clients occasionally reported that the updown confirmation email (used to confirm a new email address, provided by Devise (https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/blob/main/app/views/devise/mailer/confirmation_instructions.html.erb)) had been classified as spa...

I wanted to improve the responsiveness of the Delete account action, which could be slow for bigger/older accounts due to the many associated records to be destroyed (downtimes, metrics) being sparsely distributed in the database. This sounded like a wonderfully perfect use-case for the recent dependent: :destroy_async option [added in Rails 6.1.](https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/rails-...

For a while I've been thinking of "starting a tech blog". Well technically I already started one a while back on Medium (https://medium.com/@adrienjarthon), but I didn't like Medium because of the—let's say poor—reader experience so I didn't want to write on it nor to promote it. I saw many blog tech and hosting platform rise (and die) in the following years, everytime telling myself: _"ma...

Note: This article was initially published on Medium (https://medium.com/@adrienjarthon/updown-io-incident-postmortem-f4707cd20091) in 2019 and later moved to this official updown.io blog. All times will be given in UTC+2 (CEST) to match monitoring tools screenshots. April 3rd 2019 at 2:30 am: updown.io primary database (MongoDB) server starts to answer queries about 200 times ...

Note: This article was initially published on Medium (https://medium.com/@adrienjarthon/ruby-jemalloc-results-for-updown-io-d3fb2d32f67f) in 2017 and later moved to this official updown.io blog. I recently read this great article (https://www.levups.com/en/blog/2017/optimize_ruby_memory_usage_jemalloc_heroku_scalingo.html) about compiling ruby with jemalloc for slightly better performa...