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In the RailsConf 2014 talk titled "How to Build a Smart Profiler for Rails," speakers Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale discuss the development and functionality of Skylight, a performance profiling tool for Rails applications. They explain the origins of their company, Tilde, and the desire to create a sustainable business while focusing on the open-source community. The core purpose of Skylight is to provide developers with accurate performance measurements without the skewed data that averages might present. The key points of the presentation include:

- **Honest Response Times**: The importance of using histograms instead of averages to understand response times, providing comprehensive insights into application performance to avoid misleading averages.

- **Architecture**: How Skylight processes data through a custom-built architecture that leverages Kafka and Storm for high throughput and reliability, allowing for sophisticated analysis without overwhelming memory usage.

- **User Interface**: The implementation of a responsive UI using Ember and D3 that enables real-time data interaction, allowing developers to quickly analyze their application's performance without tedious waits for updates.

- **Detection Features**: Skylight's ability to automatically identify common performance issues such as N+1 queries through extensive data collection and heuristics, simplifying the troubleshooting process for developers.

- **Robustness**: The use of Rust for building the Skylight agent, ensuring low overhead and stability in production environments without adding unnecessary memory burden.

The presentation emphasizes that to effectively address performance problems, tools need to be intuitive and actionable rather than simply presenting raw data. The functionality of Skylight is touted as a significant advance in performance tooling for Rails, making it easier for developers to monitor and improve their applications actively.

In conclusion, Skylight is characterized as a 'smart profiler' that operates in production environments, providing real-time insights and actionable advice, enhancing the developer experience and improving application performance through informed decision-making.

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