Notes from Tuning Legacy Rails App: How to Make an Elephant Sprint
###Measuring performance
- Monitor the values of specific code paths and graph them to see performance over time (response times as one example metric)
- Automated tests that measure performance can fail based on a set threshold
- If a given code path exceeds 20% of the existing response time, then the automated test fails, alerting ops and devs that a recent code change has negatively impacted performance beyond an pre-defined SLA or threshold
- Need a production like environment
- Make that performance test environment exclusive to performance testing (don't let regular usage or QA usage affect the test results)
- Using NewRelic to compare boxes against each other