I agree that thinking about memory use steps a bit closer to the world of server administration, which doesn't thrill me. We've actually had 2X dynos in alpha f

I agree that thinking about memory use steps a bit closer to the world of server administration, which doesn't thrill me. We've actually had 2X dynos in alpha for close to a year, but we never pushed forward with a public release precisely for this reason. However, the demand from customers — especially apps on the JVM — has been overwhelming. There's no way around it: once you start doing heavy background processing (e.g. geospacial or image processing) or web concurrency with a memory-intensive language like Ruby, then you care about memory. It would be very head-in-the-sand for us to not serve this need. I'd love to imagine that there's some design that allows us to abstract away memory, but despite a lot of attempts, we haven't seen one. Further, memory is generally the most expensive part of server-side computing resources these days, so decoupling memory use from price isn't very feasible.