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 to measure how long different parts of their...

Today we’re sharing three performance enhancements that we have recently rolled out to apps running in Private Spaces:

• Dynos upgraded to the latest generation infrastructure for 10-15% perf improvement
• More consistent performance for Small Private and Shield Space dynos
• Optimized clock source selection

Heroku is a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and we work tirelessly to continuously improve and enhance the experience of running apps on our platform. Unlike lower-level infrastructure-as-a-service systems, improvements are applied automatically to apps and databases and require no action or intervention from app developers to benefit.

That means that no action is required on...

Today we are announcing a beta release of our new streaming data connector between Heroku Postgres and Apache Kafka on Heroku. Heroku runs millions of Postgres services and tens of thousands of Apache Kafka services, and we increasingly see developers choosing to start with Apache Kafka as the foundation of their data architecture. But for those who are Postgres-first, it is challenging to adopt without a full app rewrite. Developers want a seamless integration between the two services, and we are delivering it today, at no additional charge, for Heroku Private Spaces and Shield Spaces customers.

Moving beyond Postgres and Kafka, the Heroku Data team sees the use cases for data growing...

When API requests are made one-after-the-other they'll quickly hit rate limits and when that happens:

If you provide an API client that doesn't include rate limiting, you don't really have an API client. You've got an exception generator with a remote timer.

— Richard Schneeman Stay Inside (@schneems) June 12, 2019

That tweet spawned a discussion that generated a quest to add rate throttling logic to the platform-api gem that Heroku maintains for talking to its API in Ruby.

If the term "rate throttling" is new to you, read Rate limiting, rate throttling, and how they work together

The Heroku API uses Genetic Cell Rate Algorithm (GCRA) as described by...

It is never easy to know how to react, communicate, or at times, even feel, during something as heartbreaking and real as the struggles that our fellow humans face through no fault of their own. As Herokai, we stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and want to share some of our thoughts on the struggle, as well as some actions and resources that we find helpful.

We will be keeping this post updated and would love to include your voice. Please send us any thoughts that you’d like to share at: feedback@heroku.com.

“Many, if not all, of us are watching the civil rights movement taking place around the world. We are hurting, we are angry, and many of us are asking, “How...