As part of our commitment to security and support, we periodically upgrade the stack image, so that we can install updated package versions, address security vulnerabilities, and add new packages to the stack. Recently we had an incident during which some applications running on the Cedar-14 stack image experienced higher than normal rates of segmentation faults and other “hard” crashes for about five hours. Our engineers tracked down the cause of the error to corrupted dyno filesystems caused by a failed stack upgrade. The sequence of events leading up to this failure, and the technical details of the failure, are unique, and worth exploring.
Background
Heroku runs application...