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Engineering

Speeding Up Sprockets for Faster Asset Pipelines

The asset pipeline is the slowest part of deploying a Rails app. How slow? On average, it’s over 20x slower than installing dependencies via $ bundle install. Why so slow? In this article, we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons the asset pipeline is slow and how we were able to get a 12x performance improvement on some apps with Sprockets version 3.3+.

The Rails asset pipeline uses the sprockets …

Introducing Heroku’s React Refetch Operations Console

Heroku has years of experience operating our world-class platform, and we have developed many internal tools to operate it along the way; however, with the introduction of Heroku Private Spaces, much of the infrastructure was built from the ground up and we needed new tools to operate this new platform. At the center of this, we built a new operations console to give ourselves a bird’s eye view of the entire system, be able …

How We Migrated to Active Record 4

If your application is successful, there may come a time where you’re on an unsupported version of a dependency. In the case of the Heroku Platform API, this dependency was a very old version of Active Record from many years ago. Due to the complexity involved in the upgrade, this core piece of infrastructure had been pegged at version 2.3.18, which was released in March 2013. We're happy to announce that we've overcome the …

Heroku Proxying becomes Free Software

HTTP routing on Heroku is made up of three main logical layers:

  1. The state synchronization layer ensures that all nodes in the routing stack are aware of the latest changes in domains, application, and dyno locations across the platform;
  2. The routing layer chooses which dyno will handle an HTTP request (random or sticky), performs logging, error-reporting, and so on;
  3. The HTTP proxying layer handles the validation, normalization, and forwarding of requests between clients and dynos.

This last part is the one the platform team is happy to open-source today with the Vegur library.

We Patched Ruby On Rails for a 10% Performance Bump

In a recent patch we improved Rails response time by >10%, our largest improvement to date. I’m going to show you how I did it, and introduce you to the tools I used, because.. who doesn’t want fast apps?

In addition to a speed increase, we see a 29% decrease in allocated objects. If you haven’t already, you can read or watch more about how temporary allocated objects affect total memory use. Decreasing memory pressure on an app may allow it to be run on a smaller dyno type, or spawn more worker processes to handle more throughput. Let’s back up though, how did I find these optimizations in Rails in the first place?

Preparing Our Response to the OpenSSL Security Flaw

Earlier this month, the OpenSSL project team announced that three days later it would be releasing a new version of OpenSSL to address a high-severity security defect. In the end, this vulnerability resulted in another non-event for our customers, but we thought it might be useful and informative to share the process we went through to prepare for the issue.

Improved production stability with circuit breakers

Fun fact: the Heroku API consumes more endpoints than it serves. Our availability is heavily dependent on the availability of the services we interact with, which is the textbook definition of when to apply the circuit breaker pattern.

Incremental Garbage Collection in Ruby 2.2

This article introduces incremental garbage collection (GC) which has been introduced in Ruby 2.2. We call this algorithm RincGC. RincGC achieves short GC pause times compared to Ruby 2.1.

Debugging Super Methods with Ruby 2.2

Debugging a large codebase is hard. Ruby makes debugging easier by exposing method metadata and caller stack inside Ruby's own process. Recently in Ruby 2.2.0 this meta inspection got another useful feature by exposing super method metadata. In this post we will look at how this information can be used to debug and why it needed to be added.

Short Time Outs and Asynchronous Requests on Heroku

Working with our support team, I often see customers having timeout problems. Typically, their applications will start throwing H12 errors.

The decision to timeout requests quickly wasn’t made to avoid having long-running requests on our router, nor to only have fast apps on our platform, but because standard web servers do not handle these types of requests particularly well.

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