Heroku – Easy way to prevent Heroku idling

heroku

In the Heroku free apps the dynos seem to keep idling – my app has very low traffic but it's also not really acceptable in my case that my users have to wait 20+ seconds to spin up a new dyno.

Frankly, with that kind of wait, many will leave before the first page even displays.

So, I have a problem: should I be paying $36 a month to save each user an embarrassingly long 20 seconds when my traffic is in the single-digits per day.

Is there a way around this??

Best Answer

You can install the free New Relic add-on. It has an availability monitor feature that will ping your site twice per minute, thus preventing the dyno from idling.

More or less the same solution as Jesse but maybe more integrated to Heroku... And with a few perks (performance monitoring is just great).

Availability monitoring

Note: to all those saying it doesn't work: the important part in my answer is "availability monitor". Just installing the addon won't help. You also need to setup the availability monitoring with the URL of your heroku app.

Related Solutions

Git – Permission denied (publickey) when deploying heroku code. fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

You have to upload your public key to Heroku:

heroku keys:add ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

If you don't have a public key, Heroku will prompt you to add one automatically which works seamlessly. Just use:

heroku keys:add

To clear all your previous keys do :

heroku keys:clear

To display all your existing keys do :

heroku keys

EDIT:

The above did not seem to work for me. I had messed around with the HOME environment variable and so SSH was searching for keys in the wrong directory.

To ensure that SSH checks for the key in the correct directory do :

ssh -vT git@heroku.com

Which will display the following ( Sample ) lines

OpenSSH_4.6p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8e 23 Feb 2007
debug1: Connecting to heroku.com [50.19.85.156] port 22.
debug1: Connection established.
debug1: identity file /c/Wrong/Directory/.ssh/identity type -1
debug1: identity file /c/Wrong/Directory/.ssh/id_rsa type -1
debug1: identity file /c/Wrong/Directory/.ssh/id_dsa type -1
debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version Twisted
debug1: no match: Twisted
debug1: Enabling compatibility mode for protocol 2.0
debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.6
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received
debug1: kex: server->client aes128-cbc hmac-md5 none
debug1: kex: client->server aes128-cbc hmac-md5 none
debug1: sending SSH2_MSG_KEXDH_INIT
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEXDH_REPLY
debug1: Host 'heroku.com' is known and matches the RSA host key.
debug1: Found key in /c/Wrong/Directory/.ssh/known_hosts:1
debug1: ssh_rsa_verify: signature correct
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_REQUEST sent
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Trying private key: /c/Wrong/Directory/.ssh/identity
debug1: Trying private key: /c/Wrong/Directory/.ssh/id_rsa
debug1: Trying private key: /c/Wrong/Directory/.ssh/id_dsa
debug1: No more authentication methods to try.

Permission denied (publickey).

From the above you could observe that ssh looks for the keys in the /c/Wrong/Directory/.ssh directory which is not where we have the public keys that we just added to heroku ( using heroku keys:add ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ) ( Please note that in windows OS ~ refers to the HOME path which in win 7 / 8 is C:\Users\UserName )

To view your current home directory do : echo $HOME or echo %HOME% ( Windows )

To set your HOME directory correctly ( by correctly I mean the parent directory of .ssh directory, so that ssh could look for keys in the correct directory ) refer these links :

Git – How to link a folder with an existing Heroku app

Heroku links your projects based on the heroku git remote (and a few other options, see the update below). To add your Heroku remote as a remote in your current repository, use the following command:

git remote add heroku git@heroku.com:project.git

where project is the name of your Heroku project (the same as the project.heroku.com subdomain). Once you've done so, you can use the heroku xxxx commands (assuming you have the Heroku Toolbelt installed), and can push to Heroku as usual via git push heroku master. As a shortcut, if you're using the command line tool, you can type:

heroku git:remote -a project

where, again, project is the name of your Heroku project (thanks, Colonel Panic). You can name the Git remote anything you want by passing -r remote_name.

[Update]

As mentioned by Ben in the comments, the remote doesn't need to be named heroku for the gem commands to work. I checked the source, and it appears it works like this:

If you specify an app name via the --app option (e.g. heroku info --app myapp), it will use that app.
If you specify a Git remote name via the --remote option (e.g. heroku info --remote production), it will use the app associated with that Git remote.
If you specify no option and you have heroku.remote set in your Git config file, it will use the app associated with that remote (for example, to set the default remote to "production" use git config heroku.remote production in your repository, and Heroku will run git config heroku.remote to read the value of this setting)
If you specify no option, the gem finds no configuration in your .git/config file, and the gem only finds one remote in your Git remotes that has "heroku.com" in the URL, it will use that remote.
If none of these work, it raises an error instructing you to pass --app to your command.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – Permission denied (publickey) when deploying heroku code. fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Git – How to link a folder with an existing Heroku app

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