DJ has evolved into Workers

blog.heroku.com

13 points·chrisconley··6 comments

Check out the comments. It seems like there's something going on with the new pricing.

The Delayed Job add-on used to be $15, and it included one worker. Now, under the new pricing it's gone up to $36/worker overnight. Heroku really charges a premium for their services, and things like this make me feel uneasy about relying on the service.

Quite honestly, the comments on that thread just don't make sense. People are claiming they want half (or less) of one worker. That's the equivalent of saying you want half a friend — there are some things you just can't split up.

Chances are if you need less than one worker, you're probably better off not using background jobs for the time being (DJ has support to run synchronously).

On Heroku, any process that takes more than 30 seconds has to run in a background task. The only other option is cron, but that can only run once per hour.

I guess the way I see it, if you have processes taking more than 30 seconds, and need to be run more than once an hour... you definitely need a full worker. That's only 120 operations/hr to fill up your worker to 100% capacity (which is a bad thing).

P.S. I think it's super lame that people downvote you because they disagree with you. Alas, it is HN.

I agree with the comments. I have a handful of small apps that could really use background processes to create thumbnails and send confirmation emails, it's very lightweight and doesn't warrant a full $36/m dyno. Still, I'd recommend Heroku, the first deploy was so easy it made me giggle.

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