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Performance Optimization

Upgrade to Puma 7 and Unlock the Power of Fair Scheduled Keep-alive

Puma 7 is here, and that means your Ruby app is now keep-alive ready. This bug, which existed in Puma for years, caused one out of every 10 requests to take 10x longer by unfairly “cutting in line.” In this post, I’ll cover how web servers work, what caused this bad behavior in Puma, and how it was fixed in Puma 7; specifically an architectural change recommended by MSP-Greg that was needed to address the issue.

Learn How to Lower Heroku Dyno Latency through Persistent Connections (Keep-alive)

The Performance Penalty of Repeated Connections

Before the latest improvements to the Heroku Router, every connection between the router and your application dyno risked incurring the latency penalty of a TCP slow start. To understand why this is a performance bottleneck for modern web applications, we must look at the fundamentals of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and its history with HTTP.

Maybe you’ve heard of a keep-alive connection, but haven’t thought much about what it is or why they exist. In this post, we’re going to peel away some networking abstractions in order to explain what a keep-alive …

Triage and Fix with Confidence: heroku run and OTel on Heroku Fir

When Production Goes Sideways

Imagine this: It’s 2 AM, your phone buzzes with an alert, and your dashboards are screaming. Production is down. Sound familiar? An automated health check has failed, and your internal dashboards are showing a spike in errors. You’ve just pushed a new release that included a critical database schema change, and a background worker task that relies on it is now failing. The web application is still running, but users are starting to report issues. You need to investigate and fix the problem, but doing so on a running production dyno could be risky and impact …

OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, and Fir: Putting it All Together

Modern cloud-native architectures are composed of multiple microservices running across dynamic environments. Effectively diagnosing performance issues, bottlenecks, or failures requires comprehensive observability. For this, many organizations look to OpenTelemetry, which provides a standardized approach to capturing and analyzing telemetry data.

Fir is Heroku’s next generation cloud platform, designed to offer more modern cloud-native capabilities with flexibility and scalability. It’s built on proven, open-source technologies. Traditional Heroku relied on proprietary technologies, which was appropriate at the time because high-quality open-source alternatives didn’t exist. But now, technologies like Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry are considered best-in-class solutions that are widely deployed and supported …

Heroku Postgres 17 with the New Upgrade Process: Faster Performance, Easier Upgrade

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Heroku Postgres version 17, packed with new features and enhancements to your database performance. And that’s not all – we’re also introducing a game-changing feature that streamlines your upgrade experience. This new method of version upgrade is now the default, so you can try it to upgrade to Postgres 17!

Postgres 17: Powering your applications with enhanced performance and security

Before we dive into the simplicity of the new upgrade process, let’s talk about what makes PostgreSQL 17 a must-have. This release brings significant improvements that directly translate to better …

SignalR Scalability: Scaling Real-Time SignalR Applications on Heroku

SignalR makes it easy to add real-time functionality to .NET web applications—things like live chat, instant notifications, or interactive dashboards. But what happens when your app starts to grow? A single server can only take you so far. At some point, you’ll need to take advantage of SignalR scaling features to scale out your app.
In this post, we’ll walk through what it takes to scale a SignalR app to run across multiple servers. We’ll start with the basics, then show you how to use Redis as a SignalR backplane and enable sticky sessions to keep WebSocket connections stable. And …

Optimizing Enterprise Operations with Heroku’s Advanced Logging Features

Logging is the unsung hero of enterprise operations—quietly saving the day, one log line at a time. Imagine trying to maintain successful applications without knowing what’s happening inside them. This would be like flying a plane blindfolded at night, in a storm, with no instruments. Spoiler alert: Neither scenario would end well!

Today’s distributed systems are massively complex. To develop and maintain them properly, your ability to capture, analyze, and act on log data becomes essential. You need good logging for the critical insights to help you:

Diagnose and troubleshoot issues
Rightsize cloud resources
Ensure security

In this post, we’ll …

Heroku Eventing: A Router for All Your Events

Managing event-driven architecture can be challenging. For many organizations, this includes a diverse set of eventing services and buses, often across multiple organizations. Developers must manage authentication and pub/sub services across teams and applications.

We’re thrilled to introduce Heroku Eventing, a powerful tool designed to help teams manage events more efficiently and securely. This new feature simplifies the process of integrating and monitoring events from various sources, ensuring a seamless and secure experience.

Simplifying Monitoring and Observability

One of the most common challenges our customers face is the need for comprehensive monitoring and observability. Traditionally, this involves manually gathering data …

Best Practices for Optimizing Your Enterprise Cloud Applications with New Relic

If your cloud application performs poorly or is unreliable, users will walk away, and your enterprise will suffer. To know what’s going on inside of your million-concurrent-user application (Don’t worry, you’ll get there!), you need observability. Observability gives you the insights you need to understand how your application behaves. As your application and architecture scale up, effective observability becomes increasingly indispensable.

Heroku gives you more than just a flexible and developer-friendly platform to run your cloud applications. You also get access to a suite of built-in observability features. Heroku’s core application metrics, alerts, and language-specific runtime metrics offer a comprehensive …

Evolving the Backend Storage for Platform Metrics

One of our most important goals at Heroku is to be boring. Don’t get us wrong, we certainly hope that you’re excited about the Heroku developer experience — as heavy users of Heroku ourselves, we certainly are! But, even more so, we hope that you don’t have to spend all that much time thinking about Heroku. We want you to be able to spend your time thinking about the awesome, mission-critical things you’re building with Heroku, rather than worrying about the security, reliability, or performance of the underlying infrastructure they run on.

Keeping Heroku “boring” enough to be trusted …

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