How to Fix The Heroku 30 Second Delay | Hacker News Reader

How to Fix The Heroku 30 Second Delay

blog.onemonthrails.com

14 pointsmattangriffel15 comments

The free single dyno per app is really for development purposes. If you're not actively developing/testing, then the dyno sleeps after an hour of inactivity. The free dyno isn't meant for running a production site 24/7.

The proper way to "fix" the 30 second delay is to run a second dyno. The 'ping' solution just seems like cheating Heroku out of payment for a service.

"Fix".

Oh yeah, because there's something to "fix" about a free product. Is this seriously what we're coming to? Being so cheap that we can't accept that our quick hack/technology showcase/dev site/small personal website takes more about 30 seconds to spin up when it's there for FREE?

Well, thanks anyway for this nice article: now that I know this, I'm gonna remove NewRelic from my free dev app and I'll put it back when I'm ready to go into production and pay for it.

DotCloud used to be "free" too but I they reduced the free possibilities offered by their app, because of costs I guess. I hope Heroku doesn't follow because of users who think of nice "fixes".

the fix is simple. pay them. I'm pretty sure keeping development instance up is agains the tos.

Yeah, it's a neat hack I suppose but in reality it's abusing it, whether it's against the TOS or not in my opinion.

This is a good solution for me when I'm staging a site for a client before moving to a full-on production setup. A common complaint I get, that has to be explained anew each time, is that the site "takes forever to load". New Relic (or Pingdom) helps me keep it up (sorry) so my clients don't think I built them a POS.

Further, you shouldn't do this if you plan to leave it like that in the long term. That's robbing Heroku.

I do this with Pingdom.

I don't like this at all; you're basically screwing Heroku out of what they should be paid for providing a good service.

Secondly, you could set up a DigitalOcean server ($5/month) in about 10 minutes with Rails and this wouldn't be a problem.

You could also create another app that only has the dyno curl the website every hour.

The best way to avoid paying for fruit is to steal it from your local store.

how to do it if we are running at nodejs app?

I actually think it shouldn't matter what kind of app you're running on Heroku. It's just pinging the URL every 30 seconds to check availability, which has the nice side effect of not allowing your dyno to idle.

Even easier way is to use http://www.wekkars.com/

You sign up for free and add whichever websites you need that needs to stay awake.

That's fair. There are probably easier ways, but I like the added benefit of having access to performance metrics for free if I need them.

"We offer a free, monthly renewable plan! This plan lets you wake up 5 URLs every 30 minutes. At the end of the month, we send you a mail with a link to renew your free plan. As easy as could be!" now all I need is a free service to check my email and click the renew link once a month :)

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