Heroku Blog

New Relic RPM is an on-demand performance management solution for web applications developed in Ruby. New Relic recently introduced an updated agent. Some of the highlights include support for Sinatra and rack apps, as well as background workers. They also added a great Heroku feature; you can now view your backlog depth history. When a request comes in to Heroku it’s passed to your dynos to process the request. If more requests are coming in than your dynos can handle, the requests queue up. Our docs provide a more detailed overview of performance. The queue is often a sign that…

Heroku Apps run on a fully curated stack with everything from the front end caching to the base libraries selected and managed. Today, we’re making available an additional curated stack, with updated libraries and Ruby VMs. You now have the choice of running on the original “Aspen” stack, or using the new “Bamboo” stack. Both are first class citizens and the choice on which to use is yours to make. With a single simple command, you can migrate existing apps back and forth between stacks, or deploy new apps to this updated stack. Best of all, as part of the…

In December we asked our users to take a survey on how they are using Heroku. After collecting the responses, we wanted to share some of the results with the rest of our user community. Who’s using Heroku? No surprise, but the majority identify themselves as in the “Software Technology” industry, at 65% of the respondents. The rest of the user base is divided between many groups, from Consultancies with 9%%, to the Arts & Entertainment industry with 6%% and Healthcare at 2.5%%. Respondents reported annual web application budgets as high as $10M/year, with over 13% spending >$100K/annually. How are…

Gem Bundler is rapidly on its way to becoming the new community standard for managing gem dependencies in Ruby apps. Bundler is the default gem manager for Rails 3, but it will also work seamlessly with any other web framework (or no framework) since it has no dependencies itself. Using it is as simple as creating a Gemfile in the root of your app: source :gemcutter gem ‘sinatra’, ‘0.9.4’ gem ‘haml’, ‘2.2.17’ …and running “bundle install” at the command line, which sets up all of your gems. Yehuda Katz has a writeup on using bundler that outlines various scenarios for…

You get a call from your partner that your app just hit the front page of Digg. You’re away from your computer, and need to scale your app up now! Fire up Nezumi and dial your dynos to 12 to handle the load no problem. Nezumi is a 3rd party iPhone app that allows you to perform almost any of the functions that the CLI supports, from restarting your app, changing your dynos and workers, viewing logs, adding collaborators, and much more. It’s available now from the iTunes store. Marshall, the developer of Nezumi, was kind enough to provide us…