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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

Please publish these results. I think a chart showing that Unicorn + Random routing is better than Thin + Intelligent routing would go a long way to ending this whole thing. That's assuming that you can make deploying a Unicorn app as easy as it was with Thin ('git push heroku')

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Having been part of their efforts to test 2X, and 4X Dynos and using Unicorn long before the RapGenius issue I can tell you the added memory and Unicorn still has issues. We still see periods where queueing is above 500ms. The additional Dyno capacity distributes the chance of queue issues out over a larger numerical set but there is still the possibility of one dyno/Unicorn worker combo getting too much to handle. We use Unicorn Worker Killer to help in that case.

I should add that using Unicorn Worker Killer to end a process on thresholds is not a solution as much as it is another stopgap.

We might. But what does this actually get us? It helps clear Heroku's name, but it doesn't help our customers at all. I'd prefer to spend our time and energy making customer's lives better.

Given the choice between continuing the theoretical debate over routing algorithms vs working on real customer problems (like the H12 visibility problem mentioned elsewhere in this thread), I much prefer the latter.

I respect that mindset, I just don't think it would hurt. Maybe a middle ground would be a full-scale tutorial on how to switch from Thin on Bamboo/Cedar to Unicorn on Cedar for Rails users. It's a non-trivial process and I know I'd like some help with it. And in this same tutorial/article you could throw down the benchmarks you ran as motivation/justification.

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