Tech Talk: Web Firm Outsources Rails Monitoring

By Elizabeth Wasserman

A Massachusetts-based online property management service outsourced its monitoring of a free Web tool built with Ruby on Rails after Web traffic increased dramatically.

A link from the popular website Digg to the Rentometer, a free Web tool built by Investment Instruments, of Newton, Mass., resulted in 300,000 hits in 48 hours. CEO Jeffrey Krause tells IncTechnology.com that the spike in traffic led his company to outsource monitoring of the application, which was built with the popular open source Ruby on Rails Web application framework.

Elizabeth Wasserman: Tell us about how your business uses technology.

Jeffrey Krause: We were formed four years ago to address the real estate market. We're a Web 2.0 company focused on property management. We have two products. One is Rentomatic.com and one is Rentometer.com. Both try to bring a certain level of transparency and automation to the rental market. Rentals are something that most people hold close to their vests. The Rentometer offers rental comps for across the U.S.. You enter an address and you can see what other people are paying in rents around you. Rentomatic is an automated tool that landlords and property managers can use for rent processing and check processing so that tenants can pay online.

We are a bicoastal company employing over 20 people in-house and on contract. We have offices in Boston, Providence and San Francisco.

Wasserman: What happened after Digg wrote about Rentometer?

Krause: Rentometer was built initially as a viral tool to drive traffic to Rentomatic. It basically became an instant sensation. We didn't know it would have such a huge impact. We got onto the front page of Digg and Del.icio.us. And it was picked up on many blogs in the first few days. All our products are built on Ruby on Rails. But we weren't ready to handle the hundreds of thousands of hits we had immediately. We had 300,000 hits in a 48-hour period. We basically did a SQL performance analysis and found a bottleneck in performance with the database. That affected how we were doing queries to the system since we had such a large data set of rental records that we used. We were doing zip code and latitude and longitude searches which needed rewriting. We had to rewrite some of the algorithms and we were also working with upgrading the hardware to a larger server to add more bandwidth. This was all in a several hour period.

Wasserman: Why did you decide to outsource monitoring of the application?

Krause: We started using FiveRuns at that time to help us look at what was taking place inside of Rails. It has useful tools to analyze the Rails lifecycle, including queries, where events were taking place, or how long it is taking to run. It gives us instant visibility into how to optimize an application.

Wasserman: What are the benefits to working with Ruby on Rails?

Krause: We were an early adopter of Ruby on Rails. It does give you the ability to develop applications much more quickly compared to an alternative language like Java or .Net. It does give you the ability to get to the marketplace more quickly. We've used it in different ways. We've extended the libraries and made our own libraries based on Ruby on Rails. We also process rent and checks via ACH transfers, which are pretty sophisticated enterprise apps, built on top of Ruby on Rails.

Wasserman: What have you seen in terms of results?

Krause: We've continued to develop the Rentometer and Rentomatic. We've extended the reach of the data. We now have a lot more data to analyze across the country and in Canada and London to pull up for competitive analysis of rents. We've also introduced neighborhood locations. Results can now be returned based on neighborhoods.

Real estate is a hot topic these days. There's lots of stuff happening. It's good to have your finger on the pulse to see what changes are taking place.