Weekly Snap: RVM, KCachegrind & OSMC Program

25 – 29 July ended the month with tips from the development team, the finalised OSMC program and a little celebration of System Administrator Appreciation Day.
Sebastian introduced Ruby Version Manager (RVM) and how it enables different Ruby and Gem versions to be developed and tested side-by-side for complex projects. He showed how to switch between various versions and their Gems from the multi user installation, by manipulating the “PATH” variable and the ‘rvm use’ command. Installing additional Ruby versions is just as simple with ‘rvm install’, but he noted that development libraries and build tools must be installed beforehand. Sebastian commended RVM’s documentation as a good source of more tips and gave an example of how RVM can be tested once installed.
Keeping to the development efficiency theme, Jannis shared his tip for PHP profiling with KCachegrind to combat performance leakages. He recommended first installing XDebug and then using KCachegrind (or for Macs, QCachegrind) for visual representation. With these two simple tools, it is easy to see how long various methods take (absolute or relative to the execution time) as well as where and how often they are queried.
Last but not least, Pamela announced the program of the 6th Open Source Monitoring Conference on the 29 – 30 November. Featured speakers include: Michael Medin, NSClient++ Developer on “Distributed Monitoring Using NSClient++”, Mike Adolphs, Systems Administrator of XING AG on “Cucumber-Nagios: Behaviour Driven Infrastructure’s Entry into Monitoring” and Jeffrey Lensen, Systems Engineer of Hyves.nl on “Icinga at Hyves.nl”. Beyond two tracks of presentations in English and German, the OSMC will also offer three intensive workshops on “SLA Reporting with Nagios and Icinga”, “Configuration Management with Puppet” and “Icinga Kickstart” on the conference eve. Early bird specials are available till 15 August, so hurry!