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Performance Optimization

Improved Heroku App Performance with HTTP/2

Introduction:

We’re excited to announce public beta support for HTTP/2 on both Heroku Common Runtime and Private Spaces. HTTP/2 support is one of the most requested and desired improvements for the Heroku platform. HTTP/2 is significantly faster than HTTP 1.1 by introducing features like multiplexing and header compression to reduce latency and therefore improve the end-user experience of Heroku apps.

Since 2023, we’ve been working on a large platform modernization of our Common Runtime router. This project will allow us to start delivering more modern networking for Heroku. With the majority of that work now complete, we’re excited …

Expanded Memory and Compute with Heroku’s New Larger Dynos

Introduction

Heroku is excited to introduce nine new dyno types to our fleets and product offerings. In 2014, we introduced Performance-tier dynos, giving our customers fully dedicated resources to run their most compute-intensive workloads. Now in 2024, today's standards are rapidly increasing as complex applications and growing data volumes consume more memory and carry heavier CPU loads.

With these additional dyno types, we’re excited to enable new use cases on Heroku with enhanced compute and memory specifications. Some use case examples include real-time processing against big data/real-time analytics, large in-memory cache applications such as Apache Spark or Hadoop …

Innovating on Heroku is now more cost-effective

Heroku is improving the cost-effectiveness of Heroku Enterprise with the addition of Basic dynos. Now, Enterprise customers can unlock the power of Basic dynos on the Common Runtime. Basic dynos enable seamless app development and testing on the Heroku platform in the most efficient and cost-effective way. As part of our efforts to simplify our pricing and packaging, we’re ensuring parity in our product offerings between our card-paying and our Enterprise-contracted customers. Most frequently, Heroku customers use Basic dynos for testing new applications, creating reference apps, and for small-scale projects. By making Basic dynos available on Enterprise, these same apps …

Heroku Adds Third Availability Zone for Private Spaces

Heroku is excited to announce the addition of a third availability zone (AZ) for our Private Spaces product offering. Three availability zones make Private Space apps more resilient to outages. We’ve prioritized this improvement as part of our focus on mission-critical features to make the Heroku Platform even more reliable. The changeover to three availability zones is fully managed by Heroku. Heroku handles all maintenance, upgrades, and management of Private Spaces, so our customers can focus on delivering value to their users without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

What are availability zones and how does Heroku use them?

All …

Heroku 2022 Year-end Roundup

2022 was a transformational year for Heroku. In this post, we share how we’ve been enriching the Heroku developer experience in 2022, especially since committing to Heroku’s Next Chapter. We are dedicated to supporting our customers of all sizes who continue to invest and build their projects, careers, and businesses on Heroku.

Public Roadmap

As part of our commitment to increase transparency, the Heroku roadmap went live on GitHub in August 2022. The public roadmap has grown with the participation of many of our customers. Thank you for engaging with us about the future of Heroku. We want to …

Faster Dynos and Improved Performance For All

Since April 2021, the Heroku Runtime team has been working to deploy upgrades to the infrastructure powering Common Runtime apps, and we’re excited to formally announce the performance improvements that customers are already seeing.

When this Changelog post was published in May introducing the changes, almost all Common Runtime apps had been migrated from what we internally called the “classic“ infrastructure to the new “sharded” architecture. In addition to performance enhancements, this migration is expected to result in lower latency across the platform.

Around 99.9% of customers didn’t have to make any changes to their Heroku apps to benefit from …

How Heroku’s Scaling helped Zoobean through their Shark Tank Pitch

Every entrepreneur wonders: “Will my startup sink or swim?” When Felix Brandon and his wife Jordan Lloyd Bookey launched Zoobean, a startup focused on children’s reading, they found themselves swimming in rough waters early on. A few months after launch, the founders were invited to pitch their business on the TV show Shark Tank.

What felt like a sinking moment turned into more than a lifeline for the fledgling business — it entirely transformed their business model. In the year that followed the Shark Tank episode, Zoobean went from a consumer subscription service to an enterprise reading program platform …

How I Broke `git push heroku main`

Incidents are inevitable. Any platform, large or small will have them. While resiliency work will definitely be an important factor in reducing the number of incidents, hoping to remove all of them (and therefore reach 100% uptime) is not an achievable goal.

We should, however, learn as much as we can from incidents, so we can avoid repeating them.

In this post, we will look at one of those incidents, #2105, see how it happened (spoiler: I messed up), and what we’re doing to avoid it from happening again (spoiler: I’m not fired).

Git push inception

Our Git server …

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Ruby Object Allocations

Your app is slow. It does not spark joy. This post will use memory allocation profiling tools to discover performance hotspots, even when they're coming from inside a library. We will use this technique with a real-world application to identify a piece of optimizable code in Active Record that ultimately leads to a patch with a substantial impact on page speed.

In addition to the talk, I've gone back and written a full technical recap of each section to revisit it any time you want without going through the video.

I make heavy use of theatrics here, including a Japanese …

Making Time to Save You Time: How We Sped Up Time-Related Syscalls on Dynos

I work on Heroku’s Runtime Infrastructure team, which focuses on most of the underlying compute and containerization here at Heroku. Over the years, we’ve tuned our infrastructure in a number of ways to improve performance of customer dynos and harden security.

We recently received a support ticket from a customer inquiring about poor performance in two system calls (more commonly referred to as syscalls) their application was making frequently: clock_gettime(3) and gettimeofday(2).

In this customer’s case, they were using a tool to do transaction tracing to monitor the performance of their application. This tool made many such system calls …

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