If your Rails app runs a business, it deserves more than “hope it doesn’t crash today” maintenance.
Founders often ignore small issues until they become major fires that stop sales or frustrate users.
Here are five warning signs your Rails app needs help—right now.
1. Deploys Are Getting Slower (and Riskier)
If your team holds their breath every time you push code, something’s wrong.
Slow deploys often mean your app has grown messy—too many migrations, assets compiling on the fly, or large dependencies bloating the build.
When deploys take more than a few minutes or routinely break staging, it’s a signal that your CI/CD setup or app architecture needs review.
A healthy Rails app should deploy confidently in under ten minutes with rollback protection. If it doesn’t, that’s a rescue situation waiting to happen.
2. Your Gems Are Fighting Each Other
When “bundle update” feels like pulling a grenade pin, your dependency tree has become a liability.
Gem conflicts are common in older Rails apps because libraries evolve while your app stays still. Over time, these version mismatches lead to fragile environments and hard-to-reproduce bugs.
If you’ve postponed updates for more than a year or find yourself locked into a specific Ruby version just to keep the app running, you’re overdue for a maintenance pass.
Ignoring it only makes future upgrades more painful.
3. Downtime or “Weird” Outages Keep Happening
You shouldn’t be waking up to Slack alerts about “server not responding.”
Frequent downtime or random 500 errors usually trace back to one of three root causes: infrastructure misconfiguration, memory leaks, or missing background job monitoring.
Founders often mistake this for “a hosting issue.” In reality, it’s a sign that no one’s watching the full picture—logs, Sidekiq queues, and performance metrics together.
Every minute of downtime costs trust and sales. Rails Fever’s rescue clients often see stability double after we re-establish proper observability and alerting.
4. Performance Has Quietly Slowed to a Crawl
If pages that used to load in under a second now take three or more, you’re bleeding user patience.
Common causes include unoptimized queries, forgotten indexes, and background jobs stuck in retries.
You can test this easily: run rails stats or check New Relic/Skylight transaction traces. If you see controller actions taking hundreds of milliseconds instead of tens, it’s time for a health check.
Don’t wait until users start complaining—slow apps often precede total failure.
5. Your Developer Turnover Has Become a Risk
This one’s often overlooked. When a new developer says, “I need a week just to get it running locally,” your app has accumulated invisible tech debt.
Manual deploys, outdated gems, and unclear documentation don’t just slow progress—they increase the risk of mistakes in production.
If you’ve lost key developers and no one fully understands the setup anymore, your app isn’t just vulnerable—it’s one deployment away from downtime.
Bringing in outside help to stabilize, document, and modernize your environment can save weeks of future pain.
What to Do Next
If one or more of these signs sound familiar, your Rails app is quietly asking for help.
A professional rescue or audit can identify the root causes, clean up your dependencies, and make deployments boring again—which is exactly what you want.
At Rails Fever, we specialize in stabilizing and modernizing Rails apps that have fallen behind.
Whether you need a one-time Rails Rescue Kit or an ongoing Rails Care Plan, we’ll get your system back to a place where you can ship confidently again.
LinkedIn Condensed Version
5 Signs Your Rails App Needs Immediate Help
If deploys are slow, gems keep breaking, or your app goes down for “mystery reasons,” it’s time for help.
Here are the red flags we see most often in rescue projects:
- Deploys are getting slower (and scarier)
- Gem updates always break something
- Random downtime or background job failures
- Pages take seconds, not milliseconds, to load
- Every new dev says “it’s hard to set up locally”
If that sounds familiar, your Rails app isn’t fine—it’s overdue for a checkup.
🚑 railsfever.com/services/rails_rescue_kit
Need help with Rails maintenance? We offer comprehensive Rails Care Plans for ongoing support, technical audits to assess your current state, and Rails upgrades to keep you current. View our pricing plans to find the right fit for your needs.
Schedule a consultation or email hello@railsfever.com to discuss your Rails needs.