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While RapGenius it right to point out that Heroku was incorrect in describing how their load balancing works. It seems off to blame this exclusively for their p

While RapGenius it right to point out that Heroku was incorrect in describing how their load balancing works. It seems off to blame this exclusively for their performance problems. Plenty of high traffic sites not on Heroku operate just fine using nginx's upstream load balancing, which is simple round robin load balancing, paying no attention to how many requests are being handled currently by a backend. What seems particularly odd is that rap genius appears to be using their Heroku dynos to serve their css, javascript and certain images. So loading the homepage appears to make about 12 requests that hit their dynos, rather than 1. If you were looking for low hanging fruit to reduce load on the dinos for a high traffic site, this seems like an obvious place to start, rather than jumping straight to a 'smart' load balancing solution.

tomlemon 14y ago
> It seems off to blame this exclusively for their performance problems There are definitely ways to improve the performance, but you can't measure them since Heroku gives you no way of determining how much time requests spend in the in-Dyno queue. Tho you can modify your app to get New Relic to display this info: http://rapgenius.com/1506509 http://rapgenius.com/1506509 > What seems particularly odd is that rap genius appears to be using their Heroku dynos to serve their css, javascript and certain images. So loading the homepage appears to make about 12 requests that hit their dynos, rather than 1. These assets are Cached in Varnish. We serve them without hitting dynos at all
- mikeocool 14y ago
  > These assets are Cached in Varnish. We serve them without hitting dynos at all Ahh gotchya, was under the mistaken impression that rapgenius.com pointed directly at Heroku. Didn't realize there was a varnish layer in between.
  - bad_user 14y ago
    With the Bamboo stack, there's a Varnish in front of your servers that you can use to cache responses. So it's part of Heroku. Cedar no longer has Varnish.

tomlemon 14y ago

> It seems off to blame this exclusively for their performance problems There are definitely ways to improve the performance, but you can't measure them since Heroku gives you no way of determining how much time requests spend in the in-Dyno queue. Tho you can modify your app to get New Relic to display this info: http://rapgenius.com/1506509 http://rapgenius.com/1506509 > What seems particularly odd is that rap genius appears to be using their Heroku dynos to serve their css, javascript and certain images. So loading the homepage appears to make about 12 requests that hit their dynos, rather than 1. These assets are Cached in Varnish. We serve them without hitting dynos at all

mikeocool 14y ago
> These assets are Cached in Varnish. We serve them without hitting dynos at all Ahh gotchya, was under the mistaken impression that rapgenius.com pointed directly at Heroku. Didn't realize there was a varnish layer in between.
- bad_user 14y ago
  With the Bamboo stack, there's a Varnish in front of your servers that you can use to cache responses. So it's part of Heroku. Cedar no longer has Varnish.