Ask HN: What do I need to know about Heroku to launch my app? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do I need to know about Heroku to launch my app?

1 pointguynamedloren4 comments

I have been developing my first rails application using free server space from Heroku. Now that I am pondering going live (a small private beta), I'm assuming that I'll have to move beyond the free space I've been developing with. The problem is I know absolutely nothing about any of this - dynos, workers, etc. I've looked over the Heroku website and docs a few times, but it looks like it requires a basic level of sys admin knowledge - something I certainly do not have.

How do I know how many dynos or workers to add? What if I add too many and I'm wasting money? Or do they scale up as needed? Do I need a dedicated database? I read something about free Heroku apps shutting down if idle for 24 hrs, causing a short delay the next time the app is launched. How do I prevent this from happening? Please educate me on Heroku, HN!

Thanks!

Benchmark! That's how. Order the least amount of resources and then benchmark your app to see how well it's performing. If your goal is handle 100 req/s, then benchmark with that goal in mind. Your benchmark unit tests need to touch the whole stack (Ruby & SQL).

As for the 24-hrs idle time, run a periodic script that keeps it alive (by simulating a valid app action).

I'm not a Heroku user.

Regards

Joe

Filesystem is read only, so nothing that writes to disk

Care to elaborate? I'm not sure what you're referring to here..

sorry.. perhaps this is a better explanation

http://docs.heroku.com/constraints

Another example, if you're using Sass for CSS, I don't think that works seamlessly either due to this read-only filesystem restriction

As for the delay to restart your app.. its really nothing to worry about.. its probably on the order of a few more hundreds of milliseconds, but if its shut down due to low traffic, you probably don't need that kind of responsivity anyway. If its getting alot of traffic, then this sleep period shouldn't happen.

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