FiveRuns and Morph Labs on Tuesday announced they are partnering to provide free application performance testing for Ruby on Rails applications, with the goal of bolstering applications running in the cloud.

The companies will run the FiveRuns TuneUp application profiling tool on the Morph AppSpace platform-as-a-service offering for Web applications. Also part of the plan is FiveRuns Manage, for monitoring the performance and availability of Rails applications. Developers gain insight in application performance and can make decisions on code optimization via a managed hosting platform.

"Our goal is to provide a forum for focused collaboration to solve interesting and difficult performance problems. TuneUp gives developers deep visibility and relevant information to debug and improve the performance of their application and a community setting to collaborate with others to solve tough problems," said Steve Sanderson, vice president of development and Technology at FiveRuns, in a statement released by the company.

Morph uses virtual infrastructure to provide an environment for Web applications that can be provisioned and scaled.

Developers can subscribe to Morph AppSpace for free and select the version that integrates FiveRuns TuneUp. They also can participate in a secure group or open community to share performance information and advice.

FiveRuns Manage will be offered as a fee-based production option for Morp AppSpace and will enable monitoring of the health of applications within an AppSpace subscription. This integration between Manage and AppSpace is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year. FiveRuns Manage costs about $40 per managed server per month.