DeadBro Blog
Thoughts on Rails, performance monitoring, and building tools for developers.
Why We Host DeadBro on EU Bare Metal Instead of AWS
If you scroll down the DeadBro homepage, you'll find three badges that raise eyebrows: EU-hosted, dedicated bare metal, and not on AWS, Azure, or GCP. In 2026, running a SaaS on your own hardware is unusual enough that people ask if it's a philosophy or a stunt.It's neither. It's arithmetic, with a privacy bonus. He...
How to Set Up Uptime Monitoring for Any Website
Every website goes down eventually. Good hosting, clean deploys, and careful code reduce how often it happens — but they don't change the real question: when your site goes down, how long until you know?If the answer is "when a customer emails us" or "when someone posts about it," you're paying for downtime twice — ...
Why Is My Rails App Slow?
Every Rails app starts out fast. Then features ship, data grows, and one day someone says the words no team wants to hear: "the app feels slow." If that's where you are, the good news is that Rails apps tend to slow down for a fairly predictable set of reasons. This post is a quick tour of the usual suspects — not a...
Moving 300GB of Request Details Out of Postgres Without Adding Complexity
DeadBro is built to give Rails developers deep visibility into what their application is doing. Depending on how users configure it, DeadBro can log all requests or only a selected sample. But when a request is stored, we try to keep the useful details: traces, SQL queries, timings, memory information, garbage colle...
The Real Cost of ActiveRecord
Rails developers love ActiveRecord, and for good reason. It turns database access into something that feels like plain Ruby. You write User.where(active: true) and you get back objects you can call methods on, mutate, validate, and save. The SQL stays out of your way.But that convenience isn't free. ActiveRecord is ...
We Hit "Too Many Postgres Connections" — Here's What Actually Happened
You've seen the error. PG::ConnectionBad: FATAL: sorry, too many clients already. Your app is down, Postgres is refusing new connections, and you're staring at a number in database.yml wondering how you got here.Here's what most people miss: you probably did the math right. You just did it for the wrong moment in ti...
Stop Paying the “Success Tax”: Why Your Rails App Needs DeadBro APM
You’ve been there. You ship a new feature, your traffic spikes, and suddenly your New Relic or Datadog bill looks like a mortgage payment.For years, the Ruby on Rails community has been caught between two extremes:The Giants: Overpowered, over-engineered, and overpriced enterprise suites.The "Hope and Pray" Method: ...
Rails 8 Memory Optimization Guide (2026): Fix Bloat & Leaks
Rails Memory Optimization: Taming the OOM Killer in 2026If you run a Ruby on Rails application at scale, you have likely received that dreaded 3:00 AM alert: R14 - Memory Quota Exceeded.While Rails 8 and Ruby 3.5 have introduced massive performance gains, memory management remains a critical challenge. In fact, with...
Sentry vs. AppSignal: Which APM is Right for You in 2026?
Choosing the right Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool is one of those infrastructure decisions that feels like a gamble. Pick the wrong one, and you’re either drowning in a sea of noisy alerts you ignore, or you’re burning through your monthly budget on features you never use.If you are currently evaluati...
Understand What Really Happened in Production with Time Bro
Modern Rails applications don’t fail slowly.They spike, stall, cascade, and recover — often within minutes.That’s why DeadBro is built as a pragmatic APM for real-world Rails apps: not just to collect metrics, but to help you understand incidents while they’re happening — and explain them after the fact.DeadBro give...
Monitoring Performance in Ruby on Rails: A Practical Guide
Ruby on Rails is loved for its productivity and developer happiness. You can move fast, ship features quickly, and iterate with confidence. But as your application grows, performance issues tend to creep in quietly—until one day users complain that “the app feels slow.”The good news: Rails gives you a lot of signals...
Why I Built Dead Bro: The Rails APM That Doesn't Suck (Or Cost a Fortune)
Let’s be honest—monitoring your Rails app shouldn't require a PhD in configuration or a budget that rivals your hosting costs.I’ve been there. You deploy a new feature, something breaks, and you're scrambling. You look for an APM solution and you're hit with two options: enterprise tools that cost hundreds of dollar...