Why are my basic Heroku apps taking two seconds to load?

Question

I created two very simple Heroku apps to test out the service, but it\'s often taking several seconds to load the page when I first visit them:

• Cropify - Basic

Answer 1

• If your application is unused for a while it gets unloaded (from the server memory).
• On the first hit it gets loaded and stays loaded until some time passes without anyone accessing it.

This is done to save server resources. If no one uses your app why keep resources busy and not let someone who really needs use them ?
If your app has a lot of continous traffic it will never be unloaded.

There is an official note about this.

Answer 2

You should check out Tom Robinson's answer to "Scalability: How Does Heroku Work?" on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Scalability/How-does-Heroku-work

Heroku divides up server resources among many different customers/applications. Your app is allotted blocks of computing power. Heroku partitions based on resource demand. When you have a popular application that demands more power, you can pay for more 'dynos' (application containers) and then get a larger chunk of the pie in return.

In your case though, you are running a free app that few people--if any outside of you--are visiting/using. Therefore, Heroku cuts down on the resources you're getting by unloading your app--putting it in hibernation essentially--until there is a request made to your address. When that happens, and your app has been idling for a long time, it takes time to reload.

Add 1 extra dyno to keep your app from falling asleep, if that reload time is important.

Answer 3

I am having the same problem. I deployed a Rails 3 (1.9.2) app last night and it's slow. I know that 1.9.2/Rails 3 is in BETA on Heroku but the support ticket said it should be fine using some instructions they sent me.

I understand that the first request after a long time takes the longest. Makes sense. But simply loading pages that don't even connect to a DB taking 10 seconds sometimes is pretty bad.

Anyway, you might want to try what I'm going to do. That is profile my app and see how long it takes locally. If it's taking 400ms then something is wrong. But if I get 50ms locally and it still takes 10 seconds on Heroku then something is definitely wrong.

Obviously, caching helps but you only get 5MB for free and once again, with ONE person using the site, it shouldn't be that slow.

Answer 4

You might also want to investigate the caching options you have on Heroku w/ Varnish and Memcached. These are persisted independent of the dynos.

For example, if you have an unchanging homepage, you can cache that for extended periods in Varnish by adding Cache-Control headers to the response. Then your users won't experience the load hit until they want to "do something" rather than when they arrive.

Answer 5

I had the same problem with every app I have put on via heroku's free account. Now there are options of adding dynos so that your app does not get offloaded while it is not being used for a while, you can also try using redis or memcached for caching. But I used a hacky solution for my small scale project, I basically built web scraper put it inside an infinite loop with sleep and tada the website actually had much better response times(I guess it was not getting offloaded because of the script).