Don't blame me. The official policy is that titles on HN must be the title as given on the referenced page. I would have made it something more descriptive, but that's a waste of time.
Added in edit: Hah! I see now that the title has been changed so that it isn't the title on the page, even though it wasn't "egregious linkbait, or false." Color me confused. I'm not complaining, the new title is probably better, but changing it seems completely at odds with PG's statement.
I was fortunate enough to attend a talk given by the person primarily responsible for writing it and he (as well as some people already using it) said they see no discernable performance difference.
We're working on a somehow similar product that works by understanding the network traffic received and sent by your application. This means it can be language independent. http://packetbeat.com/
That's really cool! Great name, too. Probably a little less comprehensive than New Relic's offering, but I like that you don't have to do any kind of integration.
On a side note, the font you guys use for parts of your site is way too thin. It's really hard to read. See the items in the bottom/middle: http://cl.ly/image/2H0r1d1b210p
We launched a bunch of stuff today, including a new Agent SDK that is designed for exactly this purpose. It's beta today and has limited functionality, but give it a shot and let us know how it goes for you.
With the New Relic Platform, you can write a Plugin to report data about anything you want. There are Java and Ruby SDKs, and if you prefer, there is an HTTP API.
Is the best reason to use Node.js really just that it supports asynchrony? I'm sure Go also has that and Erlang has existed for a long time. There are many other options, so why Node?
Node came at a time when client side JS was really starting to take off. I can't speak much about Go or Erlang, but I suspect a lot of it has to do with marketing and some lucky momentum.
It also helps that tools like Grunt are Node based, causing frontend devs to look to Node when they need to stand up a back end. At least, Grunt was a pathway into Node for me anyway.
Node allows you to write JavaScript on the server, which is pretty awesome if you're interested in sharing code (validation, etc) on a client-heavy web app.
I don't have any experience with Go or Erlang, but Node's particular brand of asynchrony is all about non-blocking IO. There are no threads -- all instructions happen in one thread.
Don't run node.js, but my experience with New Relic has been excellent - great product from folks who have been knowledgeable, responsive and friendly without exception.
This genuinely couldn't have came at a better time.
We've just released our internal application powered by Node.js — our first. Since releasing we've been experiencing random 504 errors with no way of tracking them down, since they run in a Dokku container. Attaching to the logs displays nothing either.
Props to the New Relic node team... I remember when they started work on this, I was skeptical it could even be done (async tracing is a pain in the ass)...
Congrats, and great work, for getting the (near) impossible accomplished.
Congrats on getting this running. I know there were a lot of tough issues surrounding this and I'm glad it's finally up. I've been using this on http://gitignore.io since Feb and it's been great.
