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In the presentation "Get Your Ass to 1.9" at Ruby on Ales 2013, Nic Benders and Ralph, both team members from New Relic, discuss the transition from Ruby 1.8 to Ruby 1.9 and share their experiences during this critical upgrade. The session aims to guide those still using Ruby 1.8, as support for it is dwindling, particularly highlighting performance improvements and support factors pushing for migration.

**Key Points Discussed:**  
- **Introduction to Upgrade**: The presentation opens with an acknowledgment that many production apps still use Ruby 1.8 and emphasize New Relic's prior challenges running on Ruby 1.9.  
- **Collaboration Importance**: The success of the upgrade relied on collaboration between the site engineering and core app teams, where resource sharing was crucial.  
- **Annotated Project**: A project monitored the application performance metrics that indicated lagging performance, prompting the upgrade. Benders and Ralph underline that their sizable team of around 25 engineers contributed to the process.  
- **Reasons for Hesitation**: Attendees are prompted to consider reasons holding them back from migration, including concerns about substantial legacy applications and the complexity of the upgrade amid ongoing developments.  
- **Upgrade Strategy**: The speakers outline their strategy to upgrade all at once using feature flags, while also integrating community tools like rbenv to manage multiple Ruby versions effectively.  
- **Testing and Compatibility**: They emphasize maintaining a solid testing framework to catch potential issues early, especially with third-party gems and legacy code challenges encountered throughout the upgrade process.  
- **Performance Improvements**: Post-upgrade, the team observed significant enhancements in application performance, including a 75% reduction in workload for garbage collection and reduced CPU usage, which positively impacted user experience.  
- **Lessons Learned**: The presentation concludes with vital takeaways on the importance of collaboration, testing comprehensiveness, and preparing to tackle future upgrades, including transitioning to Ruby and Rails 2.0.

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