A report on Ruby usage among New Relic Customers

We saw recently that our friend Peter Cooper has created a nice tutorial on moving to Ruby 1.9 called The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough: How to Go From Ruby 1.8.7 to 1.9.2 and 1.9.3. We started to wonder how many of our customers are on 1.8 versus 1.9, then quickly (and embarrassingly) realized we hadn’t published a Ruby on Rails State of the Stack Report in quite some time. Read the (overdue) report below.

A little background

Many of our customers have opted in to have their performance data shared with the Rails Core Team to aid in the team’s ongoing work on the platform. In addition to that data, New Relic also aggregates information on the versions of Ruby, Rails and the various gems and plugins deployed. This data is based on a sample size of well over 10,000 application instances.

Most Commonly Deployed Ruby Versions

Since our last report, Ruby 1.9.2 has been widely deployed by our customer base. It is still eclipsed by 1.8.7 which leads the pack by far. The decline in usage of 1.8.6 continues apace.

Changes in Ruby Versions Since Rails 3

David Heinemeier Hansson recently noted “I’m proud of how quickly the Ruby community has moved from 1.8 to 1.9. Rails 3.x will be the last major release line w/ 1.8 support.” This got us thinking about how this change from 1.8 to 1.9 has progressed since Rails 3.0 was first released last August. We can see that use of 1.9.2 has increased dramatically since then, and we’re likely to see that pace of change continuing.

Most Commonly Deployed Rails Versions

Rails 3 has now become the dominant major version deployed in production with over 50% of applications using some version of Rails 3. Rails 2.3.x still represents 43% of applications in production with other Rails versions sharing the remaining 5%.

Most Commonly Deployed Ruby Dispatchers

At the time of our last report, the race between Thin and Passenger was on, with each sharing about a 40% share of the sample. Fast forward to today and Thin has taken the lead with 45% while passenger use has declined to 29%. Mongrel use has declined to 4% while Sinatra represents 2%.

Most Commonly Used Ruby Gems

This is the list of the top 50 gems deployed. If a gem you are interested in is not listed, tweet @newrelic with the gem name and we can tweet the number of deployed applications using it across our customer base. The number on the left indicates the number of times this gem was detected within an application New Relic monitors.

Update: We have released the complete list of publicly available ruby gems detected in ruby applications monitored by New Relic.

Most Commonly Used Rails Plugins

This is the list of the top 50 plugins deployed. If a plugin you are interested in is not listed, tweet @newrelic with the plugin name and we can tweet the number of deployed applications using it across our customer base. The number on the left indicates the number of times this plugin was detected within an application New Relic monitors.

Update: We have released the complete list of rails plugins detected in ruby applications monitored by New Relic.

Anything else you’d like to see?

New Relic collects somewhere around 24 billion metrics a day from over 12k customers. That’s a lot of deployment and performance data! What else would you like to see us report on? Drop me a line or let us know on twitter (@newrelic).