Google AppEngine or Heroku? | Hacker News Reader

Google AppEngine or Heroku?

Considering you can run Ruby on both, I know quite a few here would have experience with Heroku, but what about AppEngine, preferably with Ruby on it?

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Until the loading request (spinning up a JVM) performance issues get sorted out, I can't see any serious site running Ruby on App Engine. It's actually an awesome platform, except for one detail -- which is enormous: waiting 15+ seconds for a JVM to start up and respond to a request when either 1) your site hasn't been visited it the past 5 minutes or so, or 2) your current number of JVMs aren't sufficient, so another is needed. You're pretty much guaranteed to run into one of these scenarios regularly -- the first if your site is low-traffic and the second if your site is relatively high-traffic. Either way, users don't stick around and wait 15 seconds for a page to load.

Other than that, I like the App Engine architecture much better than Heroku's, although there's a lot to like at Heroku as well.

The good news for app engine is that Google has announced planned support for this (1) feature in their roadmap (2). Allowing us to pay to reserve an extra JVM at all times would eliminate the issue.

(1) http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=24... (2) http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html

I use Ruby a lot, and I always deploy Ruby web apps to Heroku. This is all about loading request times. Right now, I think that the best bet for AppEngin is coding in Python. Since I don't much use Python I have been experimenting with using Java + Objectify instead of JDO: this gets my request loding times down to usually just over 1 second. I have two writeups about this on my blog.

I have spent quite a lot of time trying JRuby + Sinatra + AppEngine. Lots of good work but not really ready. Google needs a paid for option to always keep at least one JVM for an application spun-up.

Tried both. Heroku is way better, hands down. All the problems I encounter with heroku are fixed(thanks to the awesome support team) in a matter of hours.

yes, I went to the JRuby on App Engine meetup a few weeks ago, and my conclusion was ... not ready for primetime. There's a long loading time for the initial request (if your server is lightly loaded). Also, the speaker couldn't name a real site that was deployed using JRuby on App Engine.

Note that for JRuby on AppEngine, you need to use DataMapper (instead of ActiveRecord) -- that actually looked pretty cool.

Personally my experience with appengine and ruby was not stable. Things break too often. On the other hand Heroku is much easier to setup, and update.

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