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Performance Optimization

Rolling the Heroku Redis Fleet

Over the past few weeks, Heroku proactively updated our entire Redis fleet with a version of Redis not vulnerable to CVE-2018-11218. This was an embargoed vulnerability, so we did this work without notifying our customers about the underlying cause. As always, our goal was to update all Heroku Redis instances well before the embargo expired.

As a Data Infrastructure Engineer at Heroku, I wanted to share how we manage large fleet operations such as this one. The most important aspect of our job is keeping customers safe from security vulnerabilities, while also minimizing disruption and downtime. Those two objectives …

Scaling ipify to 30 Billion Requests and Beyond on Heroku

The following is the story of how Randall Degges created a simple API to solve the common problem of external IP address lookup and how he scaled it from zero to over 10 thousand requests per second (30B/month!) using Node.js and Go on Heroku.

Several years ago I created a free web service, ipify. It is a highly scalable IP address lookup service. When you make a GET request against it, it returns your public-facing IP address. Try it out yourself!

 

I created ipify because, at the time, I was building complex infrastructure management software and needed to …

Heroku Postgres PGX: Bigger Databases, Improved Infrastructure, Same Price

Today, we’re excited to announce a major update to Heroku Postgres with a new lineup of production plans. These plans are the first component of Heroku Postgres PGX, the next generation of our managed Postgres solution.

PGX Plans introduce larger database sizes, more generous resource allocations, and a broader set of options to suit your needs and to help your applications scale more smoothly. PGX Plans are generally available as of today, and all new Postgres databases will be created on our latest generation of Postgres infrastructure. Underneath the hood, we've upgraded the CPU, memory, storage, and networking aspects to …

Heroku Connect Update: Fast Writes, Global Deployment, Guided Management Experience

Today we are pleased to announce a significant update to Heroku Connect, one that is a culmination of two years of work to improve every aspect of the service. We’ve focused on three primary areas: improving write speed, geographically expanding the service, and intelligently guiding design and troubleshooting workflows. To that end, we’ve enabled bulk writes resulting in a 5x average increase in sync performance to Salesforce, deployed Connect in six global regions to be closer to customers’ databases, and built three guided management experiences that significantly increase user productivity.

Collectively, these enhancements will enable Heroku Connect to continue …

Using Heroku’s Expensive Query Dashboard to Speed up your App

I recently demonstrated how you can use Rack Mini Profiler to find and fix slow queries. It’s a valuable tool for well-trafficked pages, but sometimes the slowdown is happening on a page you don't visit often, or in a worker task that isn't visible via Rack Mini Profiler. How can you find and fix those slow queries?

Heroku has a feature called expensive queries that can help you out. It shows historical performance data about the queries running on your database: most time consuming, most frequently invoked, slowest execution time, and slowest I/O.

Recently, I used this feature to …

How We Sped up SNI TLS Handshakes by 5x

During the development of the recently released Heroku SSL feature, a lot of work was carried out to stabilize the system and improve its speed. In this post, I will explain how we managed to improve the speed of our TLS handshakes by 4-5x.

The initial reports of speed issues were sent our way by beta customers who were unhappy about the low level of performance. This was understandable since, after all, we were not greenfielding a solution for which nothing existed, but actively trying to provide an alternative to the SSL Endpoint add-on, which is provided by a dedicated …

Dawn of the Dead Ends: Fixing a Memory Leak in Apache Kafka

At Heroku, we're always working towards increased operational stability with the services we offer. As we recently launched the beta of Apache Kafka on Heroku, we've been running a number of clusters on behalf of our beta customers.

Over the course of the beta, we have thoroughly exercised Kafka through a wide range of cases, which is an important part of bringing a fast-moving open-source project to market as a managed service. This breadth of exposure led us to the discovery of a memory leak in Kafka, having a bit of an adventure debugging it, and then contributing a …

Threshold Alerting for Application Metrics Now Generally Available

Today we're announcing two new features that will help you better manage and run apps on Heroku: Threshold Alerting and Hobby dyno metrics. Threshold Alerting provides the ability to set notification thresholds for key performance and health indicators of your app. We’ve also extended basic Application Metrics to Hobby dynos to provide basic health monitoring and application guidance. Together these features allow you to stay focused on building functionality by letting the platform handle your app monitoring.

Threshold Alerting

There are many ways to measure the health of an application. The new alerting feature focuses on what is most important …

How Emarsys Approaches Service Sizing on Heroku

Based in Budapest, Hungary, Andras Fincza (Head of Engineering) and Rafael Ördög (Technical Lead) work for Emarsys, a global marketing automation platform. Read our Emarsys customer story to learn more about their migration experience on Heroku.

How did you introduce microservices at Emarsys?

We take an evolutionary approach to our architecture. Our marketing automation platform was originally designed as a monolithic system built in PHP and MySQL and running on in-house infrastructure. We were running two major services on our in-house infrastructure: one for HDS (historical data service) and the other for smart insights and analysis. However, it was …

Apache Kafka 0.10 Evaluating Performance in Distributed Systems

At Heroku, we’re always striving to provide the best operational experience with the services we offer. As we’ve recently launched Heroku Kafka, we were excited to help out with testing of the latest release of Apache Kafka, version 0.10, which landed earlier this week. While testing Kafka 0.10, we uncovered what seemed like a 33% throughput drop relative to the prior release. As others have noted, “it’s slow” is the hardest problem you’ll ever debug, and debugging this turned out to be very tricky indeed. We had to dig deep into Kafka’s configuration and operation to uncover what was …

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