Running Rails on Heroku Update

On February 16th, we published a blog post outlining five specific and immediate actions we would take to improve our Rails customers' experience with Heroku. We want to provide you with an update on where these things stand. As a reminder, here’s what we committed to do:

1. Improve our documentation so that it accurately reflects how our service works across both Bamboo and Cedar stacks
2. Remove incorrect and confusing metrics reported by Heroku or partner services like New Relic
3. Add metrics that let customers determine queuing impact on application response times
4. Provide additional tools that developers can use to augment our latency and queuing metrics
5. Work to better support concurrent-request Rails apps on Cedar

We have resolved the first two items:

1. Improving Documentation: We’ve updated our Dev Center docs and website to more accurately describe how routing occurs on Heroku (e.g., HTTP Routing on Bamboo and How Routing Works on the Bamboo Stack).

2. Removing Incorrect Metrics: We’ve worked with New Relic to release an updated version of their monitoring tools, which we documented in Better Queuing Metrics With Updated New Relic Add-on.

We are working on the remaining three items in partnership with our early beta users:

3. Adding New Metrics: We are improving the data available through our logs in two ways. First, we’re adding a transaction ID to every request log. Second, we are working on application middleware to provide additional metrics in customer logs.
4. Providing Additional Measurement Tools: We have created a data visualization tool that analyzes log data in real-time and helps observe an app’s performance across a few key Heroku-specific metrics. This tool is currently being beta tested.
5. Improving Cedar Support: Unicorn is now the recommended Rails app server. We are currently beta testing larger dynos to support additional unicorn processes.

Fulfilling these commitments is Heroku’s number one priority. We have dedicated engineering and product teams focused on improving the performance of Rails apps on Heroku.

We’ll detail the availability of our improvements in future blog posts. If you would like to beta test any of these new features, please drop us a note and let us know which features you are interested in testing.