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Comment by aroman | Hacker News Reader

"Do single 2X dyno apps idle? Yes. Idling affects single 1X and 2X dyno apps alike."

I genuinely do not understand this. I'm still paying for it. I run a node.js app for my school that gets decent traffic, but not enough to warrant adding another dyno (and moreover I only wrote it to work on one process). Yet I still deal with the idling problem.

I would gladly pay Heroku the money for a 2X dyno if it meant I would stop getting idled (which is extremely annoying and disruptive), or even just some express per-month fee to disable idling.

I feel like I'm being punished because my app is performant and doesn't need two or more dynos...

Am I crazy here, or does this really bug anyone else?

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There's an easy solution to that. Just install the free version of New Relic add-on. In there, you'll find an option to periodically check availability. That will trigger a request to the URL you provide every 30 seconds, keeping the dyno alive at all times.

While that's true, I just really don't understand why I have to resort to sucks hacks to simply eliminate idling. I am a paying Heroku customer with a CC on file... I just want to give them money to do something properly which I could hack around legitimately.

The fact that this has clearly been brought to their attention before and they have offered no real answers (I'm literally suggesting a checkbox for $10 a month or something that simply keeps my app un-idled) frankly gets me thinking about ulterior motives. I love Heroku, and find their services very valuable, but some of their decisions make very little sense to me, like this, or more recently how they've handled the RapGenius accusations.

I totally agree that hacks to avoid idling when are willing and able to pay is lame. We've actually been working on something very similar to what you describe. Send me an email at adam at heroku dot com and I can give you early access.

for $10 a month, I'll build you a pinging service :)

You can also consider moving elsewhere -- I'm paying $9.50/month to webfaction to host my app. While it took about a half hour to set everything up, (In my case rails, postgres, etc) I use Capistrano to deploy just as easily/quickly as Heroku.

Certainly cheaper than paying for 2 dynos.

You are certainly not the only person we've heard this from. We understand that there's demand for single-dyno apps that don't idle.

But there is insufficient demand to warrant a change? But it would be technologically too demanding? But we don't think its a problem to wait 6+ seconds? But we will address this later as its not a priority?

Its great that you are aware of the issue, but it would be better if you could shed some light on why or why not this is not addressed.

But there is insufficient demand to warrant a change?

But it would be technologically too demanding?

But we don't think its a problem to wait 6+ seconds?

Actually, if you're not paying us for service, we think this is completely acceptable. The only deficiency is where users would like to pay us but still want to have only a single dyno.

But we will address this later as its not a priority?

Sort of, see below.

Its great that you are aware of the issue, but it would be better if you could shed some light on why or why not this is not addressed.

Focus comes at a premium. There are only so many product initiatives that can get complete focus at one time without sacrificing on quality. We have a lot of things in the works, but hopefully this one will get the attention it deserves soon.

Thanks for shedding some light onto your thought process about this. I can definitely understand it a bit better now.

I guess I feel differently when you say "if you're not paying us for the service", since I pay ~$50/mo in addons through Heroku, of which which I'm sure you must take a cut. So I am in fact paying you, just not in the form of dynos.

Perhaps this could be a loophole to the current system?

You can set up New Relic, whose monitoring will ping the site frequently enough that it won't idle, or if that's not an option you can set up a cron job yourself to do the same thing.

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