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Analytics

What do Conversion Ratios have to do with Site Reliability?

You have no doubt heard of Google Analytics and will be familiar with conversion or goal tracking. If you haven’t, it is a method used to measure goals and KPI’s. That is of course the well known use case, but very often we see web teams using conversion tracking to also identify site problems. Many eCommerce teams will monitor their sites sales conversion ratio and if it drops they will instinctively know that there is a problem.

Ruby logging best practices and tips

Ruby is an opinionated language with inbuilt Ruby logging options that will serve the needs of small and basic applications. Whilst there are fewer alternatives to these than say, the JavaScript world, there are a handful, and in this post, I will highlight those that are active (based on age and commit activity) and help you figure out the options for logging your Ruby (and Rails applications).

Solr on Docker: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

This talk was given during Lucene Revolution 2017 and has two goals: first, to discuss the tradeoffs for running Solr on Docker. For example, you get dynamic allocation of operating system caches, but you also get some CPU overhead. We'll keep in mind that Solr nodes tend to be different than your average container: Solr is usually long running, takes quite some RSS and a lot of virtual memory. This will imply, for example, that it makes more sense to use Docker on big physical boxes than on configurable-size VMs (like Amazon EC2).

Solr: Optimize Is Not Bad For You Deep Dive Into The Segment Merge Abyss

They say optimize is bad for you, they say you shouldn't do it, they say it will invalidate operating system caches and make your system suffer. This is all true, but is it true in all cases? In this presentation we will look closer on what optimize or better called force merge does to your Solr search engine. You will learn what segments are, how they are built and how they are used by Lucene and Solr for searching.