When talking to Heroku users, a question that frequently comes up is "when do my apps go to sleep, and why?". Though the behavior is documented in Dev Center, we'd like to provide more immediate visibility into the state of your apps at any given moment.

When Do Apps Sleep?

When an app on Heroku has only one web dyno and that dyno doesn't receive any traffic in 1 hour, the dyno goes to sleep.

When someone accesses the app, the dyno manager will automatically wake up the web dyno to run the web process type. This causes a short delay for this first request, but subsequent requests will perform normally.

Apps that have more than 1 web dyno running never go to sleep and...

A couple months ago, we launched a completely redesigned Heroku status site. Since design is important to us and, we think, to many of you, we're taking a break from our usual blog posts to dig into the Heroku approach to visual product design.

Read on to experience the twists and turns on the way to the final design and let us know in the comments if you want to see more posts like this.

The Premise

For platform providers, a status site is a way to build trust with your customers, and in some cases, future customers. Heroku is no different. Our existing status site hadn't been updated in over two years and was showing its age. We took this as an opportunity to go back to...

Developers like you deploy code to hundreds of thousands of apps every month on the Heroku platform. Some of these are production apps which serve hundreds of millions or even billions of requests per month. Uptime of the platform is critical for such apps.

We want to achieve the sustained reliability that these apps require. But when there are incidents that impact uptime, we want to maximize our transparency and accountability to you and all developers on the platform.

Today, we’re launching a completely redesigned status.heroku.com, which provides real-time status of the platform, the ability to sign up for email or SMS notification of incidents, and recent uptime history in both...

Today we're happy to announce the availability of Heroku Scheduler. Scheduler is an add-on for running administrative or maintenance tasks, or jobs, at scheduled time intervals. It's the polyglot replacement of the Cron add-on, with more power and flexibility. And it's free; you just pay for the dyno time consumed by the one-off tasks.

A dashboard allows you to configure jobs to run every 10 minutes, every hour, or every day, and unlike the Cron add-on, you can control when. E.g. Every hour on the half-hour, or every day at 7:00am.

Polyglot Tasks

Tasks are any command that can be run in your application or even the Unix shell.

For Rails, the convention is to set up rake...