[LRUG] Final lineup & registration details for February

[Ben Scofield]

Just to reply to one part of this:

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 5:34 AM, Neil Middleton <neil.middleton at gmail.com>wrote:

2. When do you know you should crank up/down dynos. I don't think Heroku
>> offer autoscaling like Google App Engine does. Did you keep monitoring
>> NewRelic, or did you have some sort of monitoring system to alert you when
>> certain metrics reaches some threshold?
>>
>
> There are tools coming out that allow you to autoscale, but we were doing
> it manually.  Heroku really need to add this as it would be a massive help.
>

We most likely won't be adding autoscaling -- at least not in any near
future. The problem is that scaling is entirely app-dependent, and in at
least one not-uncommon case the usual solution (bumping up dynos) could make
the situation *worse*.

Here's the case: your DB is the problem, not your app code. For whatever
reason, queries in the DB are stacking up and increasing your backlog.
Increasing the dynos would just mean more traffic to the DB, which'd cause
further backups, which would cause further dyno increases from the
autoscaler, which would ... result in 1) an app that was down quite a bit,
and 2) an incredibly large bill.

That said, there are some third-party autoscalers for Heroku apps. We don't
officially recommend any of them, though.

We love your story, Neil :)

Ben
---
Ben Scofield
Developer Advocate at Heroku
ben at heroku.com | @bscofield
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