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Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

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Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#41

Post by aelaguiz »

The complaints of what amounts to essentially support contract extortion are something that I've personally experienced.

They were literally ignoring our repeated customer service tickets pleading for assistance or a phone call or something. We were paying them hundreds of dollars per month at the time.

When we finally got through the only people we could get ahold of were salesman. Essentially we were made to believe that only for $1000/mo support contract would we receive customer support.

FWIW Our issue was frequent network timeouts to other ec2 services which were. They did eventually resolve those after months and never did they assist us.

Heroku's platform is a significant accelerator of development for a startup. Using the platform has enabled us to do things faster and better than we'd otherwise be able to do them for the money and time we've invested.

That being said, I look forward to they day they have a true/viable competitor and are forced to compete on service. I'm extremely bitter towards them at the moment as a result of my customer support torture experience.

Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#42

Post by seivan »

benologist wrote: post #6

Reading things like 512mb isn't enough for more than one request at a time, and one request at a time, and the performance of that one request looking terrible even though it's obviously got an entire vm dedicated to it... What are (edit:) Rails developers getting in exchange for these enormous penalties that makes it worth choosing?

What kind of bullshit is this? That's 512mb of shared resource, you decide how many requests it actually is.

usually larger rails app can do 2-3 requests on a dyno. Just configure Unicorn workers to that and set it on your procfile. This is known since 2011 (a week after Cedar as announced)

Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#43

Post by wmf »

hashset wrote: post #21

Did they seriously sell a Gem 'New Relic' as a diagnostic tool that flat-out makes up queuing and response latency numbers on requests to their platform? If this is true then hell yes they need to refund all their customers!

New Relic is a third party tool that Heroku resells. The numbers aren't made up; they are measured, but in the wrong place. The result is still wrong numbers, but it's not obvious where to pin the blame.

Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#44

Post by busterarm »

TillE wrote: post #30
brown9-2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying being from New York implies "dickishness"?

It's a self-preservation thing. Many New Yorkers are nice by default, but don't you dare fuck with us.

This is exactly what I mean. Thanks.

Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#45

Post by ibrahima »

jules wrote: post #33
ibdknox wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just seem to have different definitions of "fix". Fix, to me, implies the issue goes away. Are 1, 2, and 3 important? Yes. 4 should never have been an issue to begin with. And 5 is a non-solution given that simply adding more lines of execution does not address the root problem. In no way have they solved the actual issue (a poor queuing strategy). And so even if you now know that you're getting awful performance…

> And 5 is a non-solution given that simply adding more lines of execution does not address the root problem. Actually more threads of execution does solve the problem. The difference with just doubling the number of dynos is that on a single dyno requests can be routed intelligently. The reason why random routing sucks is that request processing times have a fat tailed distribution: there is a small but still signif…

This post should be stickied at the top of every Heroku queueing thread. People keep acting like the "intelligent routing" system is trivial to build and has no overhead which are both patently false. It's clear that they can't go back to the old method with their newer (since 2011) architecture so the solution is for apps to fix their own performance issues.

Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#46

Post by Jayschwa »

TillE wrote: post #30
brown9-2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying being from New York implies "dickishness"?

It's a self-preservation thing. Many New Yorkers are nice by default, but don't you dare fuck with us.

Or what, exactly? I recently moved to NYC from Iowa and I haven't noticed much of a difference except more aggressive driving.

Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#47

Post by ptomato »

kmfrk wrote: post #20
thraxil wrote: post #7

"Yes, one solution is to run a concurrent web server like Unicorn, but this is very difficult on Heroku since concurrent servers use more memory and Heroku’s dynos only have 512mb of ram, which is low for even processing one request simultaneously." Is this really accurate? 512mb is barely adequate for serving a single request at a time? I'm not a Rails developer, but that sounds terrible. I'm all for trading off som…

Atwood's new Discourse thingy recommends 1GB of RAM: We also recommend a minimum 1 Gb RAM to host Discourse, though it may work with slightly less. ~ http://www.discourse.org/faq/ Guess it depends.

Note that that's their recommendation for a single VPS that includes the postgres & redis servers on it as well, not just the Rails stack.

Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#48

Post by busterarm »

brown9-2 wrote: post #22
busterarm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tom is from New York. He's also a founder. Both roles typically imply/require a certain amount of dickishness. Thing is, somebody had to take Heroku to task over this, and until they fix the problem somebody has to keep taking them to task. I worked in the office beside Tom's for a year (pre-Rap Genius). He's a sharp guy. More importantly, he's right. I don't think being nice has any relevance to Rap Genius' bottom l…

Are you saying being from New York implies "dickishness"?

We're just very direct. There's not much value placed on unnecessary politeness or platitudes. The biggest social faux pas to a New Yorker is wasting our time.

Some people see that as us being rude and others actually appreciate it.

Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#50

Post by wmf »

Sujan wrote: post #32
ibdknox wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just seem to have different definitions of "fix". Fix, to me, implies the issue goes away. Are 1, 2, and 3 important? Yes. 4 should never have been an issue to begin with. And 5 is a non-solution given that simply adding more lines of execution does not address the root problem. In no way have they solved the actual issue (a poor queuing strategy). And so even if you now know that you're getting awful performance…

We have, indeed. I never expected them to completely rebuild their service because of some customers (very small minority, I assume) aren't totally happy and satisfied with their product. That clearly sucks for the affected people. It's reason for them to leave the product and platform and go somewhere else, where the problem is not an integral part of the produt. But it's not a reason to be a dick.

I'm not so quick to think that Heroku can't improve their routing. www.rapgenius.com resolves to four IP addresses/routers; why not one or two?
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