Is there a way to see how many dyno hours you have used so far this month on Heroku? I know it's on the invoice you get, but I want some "live" data.
I use some "One off processes" (heroku run rake...) quite often and want to track this somehow.
It was a bug.
Contacted Heroku support and they fixed it. You can see current usage here: https://api.heroku.com/account
Related
I'm new to heroku and realized that, with a free dyno, your app idles after 30 minutes of inactivity. I also know that you only get 550 hours of dyno awake-time a month, so I don't want to ping it continuously.
What I'm looking for is a way to keep my application awake for 18 hours a day. As far as I know, the only way to achieve that is by pinging my site, but I cant find a way to ping it only from 8am to 2am. I'm looking for a free option, but I will definitely upgrade my dyno to hobby status once the final app is pushed out.
Any advice on this subject would be greatly appreciated!
ps I looked around, and couldn't find anything about pinging during a specific time period.
Edit: I've seen that New Relic and other sources are able to ping my website, but it seems to me like they ping continuously. While I do want it to be consistent, so that the dyno doesn't fall asleep, I was looking for something that would let me be able to have it ping the site every day in a specified time period! Oh, and I know the easy answer, I don't see what's wrong with taking advantage of the free hours heroku provides me with! I already said that I'm definitely going to upgrade later on.
How to speed up my Rails app on Heroku? Will buying 2 dynos speed up my site significantly?
I found these tips and already implemented some of them on my Rails app, but I'm interested whether there are more?
“Thin controller and fat model”
Split views in separate partials
Use of CDN
Caching
Using the asset Pipeline
Edit: Getting a downvote, so clearly something wrong with my question, too broad?
(It probably would have been better if you asked about a specific part of performance you want to improve upon).
Here's a tip, use New Relic to ping your site and check that is still up and running:
you will be alerted to any issues
your Heroku app won't go to sleep which will increase its response time as it won't have to 'wake up' if no one has viewed your site for a while.
Plus use New Relic anyway as it has a wide range of features that are really useful for monitoring database requests, response times, etc.
Just wondering how everyone pushes updates to their production server on Heroku, without bringing the app down for a few couple of seconds?
Pushing to Heroku (especially using something like Unicorn), takes a while for the web app to load. Especially when there are end-users trying to access the site. They end up with 503 pages.It takes up to 30 secs to a minute for Unicorn processes to load.
There are TWO things you need to accomplish this, and it's not trivial.
1) Migrations need to be backwards compatible (i.e., run while the app is live). See this article about that: http://pedro.herokuapp.com/past/2011/7/13/rails_migrations_with_no_downtime/
2) Deploy using TWO heroku apps. I opened a ticket with Heroku on this topic and this was their reply:
We're currently working on a solution to provide a zero-downtime
deploy but do not have an ETA on when this might be available.
In the meantime a workaround that might be possible would be to deploy
to two separate apps. You can push new code to the second app, spin it
up, then move the domain names over to the second app. Wash and repeat
on the next deploy. This is less than ideal but might get you the
desired result in the interim.
If you do this, you will want to automate as much as possible since there's a lot of ways to mess that up. Here's an article on that topic: http://casperfabricius.com/site/2009/09/20/manage-and-rollback-heroku-deployments-capistrano-style/
Why?
These two solutions must both be done because the database migrations must work in BOTH (live and to-be-live) versions of the code. Once you have that working, THEN you can solve the second problem of having the application itself not seem like it went down. There is no supported way to spin up and spin down individual dynos once a push is started.
UPDATE:
There is a beta feature available with Heroku now. To use do the following prior to pushing:
heroku labs:enable -a APP_NAME preboot
This will change the behavior of the app during pushes. It will push up a parallel instance that will warm up for two minutes. Almost exactly two minutes after the push, all traffic will route to the new app. Be careful with migrations, as I mentioned above, as they are still an issue.
Heroku is currently testing their new preboot feature in beta. You might wanna check it out. Unfortunately it only works for ≥2 web dynos. And it also doesn't seem to work for heroku scale web=… which would be important to make it work with HireFireApp.com.
I have been hosting a site on Heroku for a few months that is very soon to go into production.
Since I began with them, there have been at least three significant outages, one of which was the disastrous Amazon outage last month and another of which is a multi-hour outage happening today.
I believe in Heroku's vision and I think they are a great company, but I am faced with the ultimate problem: if they can't keep sites up and running, everything I like about them doesn't really matter.
Is Heroku a reliable provider to run a production site on Rails?
Are there any other providers I might look into that have a better reputation for reliability than Heroku?
In my opinion, downtime can happen with almost any provider. What you need to see is how well or badly the host handles the downtime and the effort they make in keeping the customer updated about possible resolution.
In my opinion Heroku is a great place to host your app. The advantages and ease of deploying there covers up for the recent (and rare) downtime FOR ME.
I am user of Heroku with Amazon RDS plugin for the past 7-8 months and my conclusion is there is nothing to appreciate about Heroku except their architecture. Here is why I think:
Even though it is sold for $250 million+ they were still NOT using the Amazon multiple zones feature of Amazon. Below is the link how SmugMug survived amazon crash by using Amazon's multiple zones feature.
http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2011/04/24/how-smugmug-survived-the-amazonpocalypse/
No phone contact support in the event of issues (not application but Heroku's), lot to learn from Rackspace
The application I am hosting, people will starve if it goes down for few hours on Friday forget about 60 hours downtime.
I see intermittent deployment and connectivity issues. Please visit this link for a confirmation:
http://status.heroku.com/
I know developers love it because they throw a cheap web process called 'dyno' for free.
So far Heroku does not offer multiple availability zone redundancy. If you want something more reliable than Heroku you can create your own EC2 instances in multiple availability zones. Of course this will require significantly more server upkeep, admin, and deployment time.
I have seem Heroku to be reliable. I highly recommended it for starting out and validating your idea. I believe when you start your project you want get it out quickly (to customer or to public).
As mentioned in other comments at some point you might need to switch over to EC2 as you might need zone redundancy and it might actually become cheaper to run of EC2 especially if you already have an SA in the company.
No. It is not. As a customer I've experienced multiple critical outages. These things happen and I get that. But what makes Heroku unreliable is their nearly non-existent support when things do go wrong. I would use caution when evaluating Heroku or any provider for that matter and really understand what you're paying for. Paying as much as I did for Heroku I expected more.
As an example one of their databases went offline early on a Sunday. I immediately was made aware, not from Heroku but from our customers and new relic alerts. I contacted Heroku support just to get the ball rolling as I began to troubleshoot. 24 hours later I had literally no responses from Heroku. I could not fork, follow, or take snapshot of the database as they suggest (because they were experiencing issues) so I basically sat on my hand and waited. Hoping that somebody would respond as I frantically attempt to recover somehow, someway.
Was this their fault. No. Not at all. I should/could have done something to mitigate this failure. But as much as I pay for their servies each month I expected something resembling a response to my critical issue.
Our our app is hosted by Heroku and went down mutliple times over the last 12 months.
Two times it was caused by one of the third-party apps that Heroku offers:
We used Zerigo (recommended by Heroku) for our DNS. This has caused our site to go down twice - one time it took over 12 hours te recover. This is absolutely crazy for something like DNS, so we have switched to a more reliable provider.
The Redistogo app went down once.
Heroku does bring some benefits, but be careful about the apps you select.
In my org i build simple SPA productivity apps, and have been using Heroku to host them for the last year after migrating away from a physical box server to cloud VMs.
I've had multiple days lost due to Heroku development hindering outages. Usually while running apps stay online, and work, when Heroku goes down you can't push updates or restart apps.
Lets also not forget the ridiculous times for scheduled maintenance (usually 2PM EST, midweek....REALLY?)
As of writing this, the Logging system for Heroku has now been acting up (more or less down) for over 24 hour.
Thankfully my apps aren't mission critical. While I like Heroku's ease of use, it's just not worth this much headache for what is nothing other than an AWS middle-man.
That said, I'm moving over to just pure AWS EC2 instances.
I have a table in my database with a list of emails to be sent, each at a specific time (precision down to the minute).
I'm on heroku, and I don't want to spend anything right now.. Is there a way to do this? The only way I thought was to create a deamon/cron somewhere else and make it call a private url every minute.. any other idea? Any way to have some background process or something that can handle this (on Heroku and without paying extra for addons..)?
thanks!
Heroku's free cron addon runs only once a day, so it is not suitable. Their paid cron addon runs only once an hour, so it is also not suitable. Running a daemon/cron elsewhere is a hack that will become problematic very quickly. It's fundamentally bad architecture.
Using delayed_job with a single Heroku Worker makes sense. Plus, delayed_job lets you specify exactly when each job should be run, down to a 5-second granularity. Yes, it is $36/mo to do this. But it frees you from doing things the wrong way. Plus, if you expect that you will not need the Worker most of the time, you can look into auto-scaling delayed_job on Heroku so the Worker is only turned on when you need it.
There is a whole bunch of free online services that would be more than happy to request your web page on a schedule that you set. You don't need to spend or code anything. Just Google :)