Notes from @gkparishphilp's Heroku-Fu talk at SD Ruby; June 6, 2013

2013-06-06-sdruby-heroku-fu.md

Heroku-Fu

By: Gk Parish-Philp
Date: June 6th, 2013

Tips and tricksto get the most out of Heroku

1. Beginnings
2. Why Heroku
3. Issues
4. Hacks
5. Additional Tips

• Appendix

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1. Beginnings

• Wanted to move beyond localhost development
• Realized there was a lot to learn to build an application
• Partnered with a good friend that was a back-end dev

2. Why Heroku

• Business requirements caused for large volumes of traffic
• Partner was spending 12 hrs/mo. on sysadmin work
• Expensive, but worth it if you value your time and sanity

3. Issues

• Idle-Dyno Fail - Dyno's spin down when not in use
• Single dyno fails under heavy load

4. Hacks

Keep Dyno Awake

• Enable New Relic Addon
• heroku addons:open newrelic
• Settings > Availability Monitoring > Enable (Keeps Dyno Awake)

Support Additional Concurrent Traffic

• Enable Unicorn
• Almost Doubles Performance

Caching

• Add memcachier addon to heroku
• Add memcachier and dalli gems to project

CDN

• Create CDN Account
• Configure DNS settings

5. Additional Tips

• Improve Rails Application Performance
• Sync Assets to Amazon S3
• Move long running processes to background workers
• Use an app like HireFireApp to manage worker processes
• Use an EC2 Hosted DB
• Use Multi-App Service Architecture
• You can only get so far on a free lunch

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Appendix

• Source Code: https://github.com/parishphilp/herokufu
• Load Testing: http://blitz.io
• Memcache: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/memcachier
• CDN: https://www.cloudflare.com/

Thanks Kevin!