Free CodeSchool From New Relic [Sponsored]

New Relic is currently incentivizing new customers with three free months of Code School classes. But really, the bribe shouldn’t be necessary. We know, this sounds like the type of hyped-up pitch you might hear on a bad infomercial, but here at XDA, New Relic APM has completely revolutionized our ability to debug application processes, allowing us to speed up the site while reducing server costs. When they wanted to sponsor the site this month, we were thrilled to promote a product that we both know and use (we are very happy paying customers and have been for years). We’ve explored all options for monitoring site performance, but nothing comes close to the insight we gain from New Relic. Every web developer and mobile app developer should at least consider using New Relic. The company offers free trials and lite versions that are free-for-life on both its web app and mobile products, so there’s no reason not to.

XDA has a complex, layered infrastructure with html front-end caching, data store caching via Memcache and APC, and of course, a large database. When the site occasionally slowed down, it was impossible to determine why. On our local and staging development environments, we were able to trace application processes to determine hangups, but when working at scale, serving live pages to millions of users, we couldn’t get the same insight. After installing New Relic’s PHP plugin (they have plugins for just about every application server type), we instantly gained the ability to dig deeper into the application server processes to see where bottlenecks were occurring. The New Relic plugin software allows us to trace all the way back through the application to explore specific functions and database queries and see exactly how long they are taking to execute. We have even been able to use New Relic to assist third-party application developers to optimize their apps to work better on our servers.

Over the past few years as customers, we’ve watched New Relic launch an entire suite of products related to code-level monitoring of application performance. Specifically for mobile app developers, New Relic Mobile provides similar code-level diagnostics as the web app product. You can identify poor code paths; track CPU, memory, and database usage metrics; monitor interactions with external services and APIs; and get insight as to whether performance is being impacted disproportionately in specific geographies or on specific carriers. For a monitoring product that is used by many of the largest apps in the world, the “pro” level pricing is very reasonable ($29 per app per month), and even the free “lite” version still provides significant value.

Developers often come to us needing help debugging slow processes, and we almost always recommend installing New Relic to trace hard-to-find bottlenecks in both web and mobile applications. And today, we’re publicly making that same recommendation to you. Try it out for free. Deploy and get three free months of Code School.

Does anyone out there already use New Relic for mobile app performance monitoring? If so, let us know about it here.

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source: xdadevelopers