What is the best way to get a ballpark idea of what kind of resources an application needs if it is running on Heroku (how many dynos and what db plan you should be running)?
My non-technical friend had his site built in rails and it is currently being hosted on Linode by the shop that built the app. They aren't providing the support he was hoping for, and is interested in having me move it over to Heroku, but we are trying to get an idea of how much more that is going to cost him. I tried contacting the dev shop directly to find out what the current instance is running on, but they aren't getting back to me.
I have access to their analytics, and the current repo, so from this can I glean what kind of initial setup we are probably going to need, and if so what should I be looking for? I realize that this is very situation dependent and not an easy question to answer, but any insight would be greatly appreciated.
dyno-blitzer will help you find out how many dynos you'll need to support 1,000 users, but there are a lot of questions you need to answer in order to try and ballpark what you'll need with Heroku:
How big is the database right now? How fast is it growing?
How many users do you need to support? If you only need 5, the numbers dyno-blitzer gives you probably won't be anywhere near what you need.
How much delayed processing work is being done?
What sort of things does the app need that have to be provided through add-ons with Heroku?
Once you know these, you should be able to get a rough ballpark, but it won't be laser accurate - this will heavily depend on the app and exactly what it's doing.
Related
I'm releasing my first large app soon, and I've been thinking of writing a small app to manage the databases for my own app with master privileges, to clean up data and the like. This will just be a dev project shared with a few people within the company.
Is this something that people do?
Has anyone had any experience with this?
It feels like a good idea, but I'd also really love feedback.
I'm assuming when you say database you are not referring to coredata specifically but rather some remote database. There is certainly nothing wrong with you creating tools to help you do your job.
I think really this answer is going to come down to time management. If your database has complicated relationships,etc that a simple database editor is not going to be able to maintain or will be highly prone to human error mistakes, I'd say go for it. But, if you are just making trivial changes it might be a more efficient use of time to use a existing solution.
For a mostly static website without a lot of stuff going on in the back end, how many page views can the free version of heroku handle (ruby on rails). Can it handle 100 a month, 1,000, 10,000, etc. When shoudl I consider upgrading it and are there better services? Thanks in advance!
Unfortunately, the only real answer to this question is "It depends". It depends on how many database calls you are making, whether or not those database calls are optimized, whether you have any form of caching in place, etc.
However, I am currently in a similar situation as you and just launched an early stage startup on Heroku. I highly recommend installing New Relic (don't worry, there's a free tier) to keep an eye on site usage/statistics.
Another (free!) addon I installed was Papertrail, which allows me to keep a close eye on the Heroku logs, and trigger alerts if there are too many errors (which could mean it's time to scale-up).
On the other side, you can test your Heroku server by sending load to it using the Apache Bend tool. See this answer for a good explanation.
Lastly, I would take a look at this question, which provides many good references on Heroku performance.
Good luck!
Heroku is free for up to 5 apps. Each app has access to 750 dyno-hours per month. That should be more then enough for a mostly static site.
I get about 4k-5k visitors per month on a Ruby app, but with a lot of caching.
I am developing an app that allows users to post to rooms/pages, much like a forum or here (stackoverflow). I have already built out the entire app, however, I have one last obstacle to climb: How to handle updating posts for a user.
I have done alot of research into the topic, and I believe Long Polling is the way to go, at least until I get an immense amount of traffic (if that happens, I'll figure out how to implement websockets). This is because Long Polling will be easier to implement, it is more widely supported, and given that I am deploying to heroku it will be easy to upgrade my server resources quickly. Anyway, I wanted to know what the best practices are of long polling, both in terms of user interaction, and server load.
Should I automatically place posts on the page, or create an alert system such as the one here on stackoverflow?
Any and all input would be appreciated. If you think my logic is wrong in anyway, please tell me!
For a system like this we suggest using something like pusher. Check out the documentation for more details as to how to do it. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/pusher
I am attempting to determine what can possibly be the causative factor for 20+ second response times from a Rails 3 application located in EC2 using Elasticache. I have reason to believe the problem is in fact cache related, but I have no numbers to prove it. I'd like to get those numbers. For the sake of completeness, we're running the applications atop Ubuntu 12.04 .
Searching Google, I found nothing directly relevant to my situation, and no StackOverflow topics I could find were even remotely relevant to my situation. If anyone can point me to some documentation on the matter, I'd be quite appreciative. Thank you!
I've found the best tool for this to be New Relic.
http://newrelic.com/
I don't work for them and get no benefit from you trying them.
They have a free level that you can start with. If you go up to the non-free version you can literally trace all your requests through different models and into the database telling you how long the app spent in each section. It's a great tool for profiling.
Do you, by any chance have access to standard web logs including URLs and response times?
I faced a similar situation, searched the web, found nothing relevant, and eventually decided to roll my own, which I shared in this SO post:
Profiling a multi-tiered, distributed, web application (server side)
While it is far from perfect and may be too high level for some use-cases, it gave me a pretty quick and broad insight into where the application I was trying to profile is spending most of its time in, and what the slowest parts are. HTH.
The best parts of it are that:
It is 100% platform and programming language independent.
It is a 100% free software solution
I know this is not a really programmic question, but which one should I deploy my app too?
Basically, I will have a straight forward Rails app with a a decent database usage. Heroku is obviously a great platform and has a lot of gimmicks. Duostack however seems to getting bigger and bigger while still in beta, and I really like their autoscaling feature, since I wouldn't have to monitor my site like 24/7 to be as cost efficient as possible.
Secretly, I just hope that Amazon will extend Elastic to Rails, but that would probably take a while
Well you have to get an invite to use Duostack, I don't know how hard that is. Plus, if you're looking to do a production app, they're still in Beta so there's no 100% guarantee things will be stable, or that there won't be API changes.
ALso, is duostack going to offer a free usage tier?
If you're comfortable with the answers to all those questions, then just go for whichever one you like better.
One nice thing about Heroku is it is well-established enough to have a lot of third party integration, and that can make development just blissful if it includes the integrations you need :)
Probably not a wrong choice between the two, though. Request a beta invite and if you get in, try both. Since all you have to do is "git push" to deploy to both, it ought to be pretty easy to do a direct side-by-side comparison of the workflow.