Its a good question, and one that you would want to ask of any platform you plan to host on.
I just saw the heroku team at RailsConf, and they laid out some info that was pretty interesting. Here are my raw notes on their largest sites: some of their bigger apps http://www.scvngr.com explosive growth featured on major sites millions of users http://www.syphir.com rules and smart push for gmail to your phone anti-social, delay emails from facebook/twitter until the end of the day, so I can get work done they got huge spike in traffic spun up more dynos from the command line brought them down ofter spike http://getcloudapp.com mac based, file sharing shift cmd / enter takes screenshot pushes to cloudapp, heroku -> s3, short url, copies to clipboard >4k req/min 20% week over week growth dedicated db When you start to think about the performance of your application, there are a few points I woud want to make: 1. Scalability does not equal performance. While they are related, its possible to have a scalable app that is actually pretty slow (facebook doesn't feel all that fast to me, but it scales to handle its users). Heroku gives you a scalable platform, you tune your app to be as performant as possible, and spin up more dynos as needed. This lets you handle growth over time, or in bursts, in a balanced progressive way. 2. What kind of performance issues do you expect? Heavy writes, mostly reads, lots of background processing, CPU intense activities, consistent usage or month-end spikes? Facebook and google are very different apps, with very different architectures, once an app gets to that size, I think the hosting solution becomes very custom. 3. Heroku speeds up the development and deployment process, making it easier to get an app out and get critical feedback before the 'cement' dries. Its more important to launch a functional, but slow, application than to delay the launch or prematurely tune an app in the name of performance. (tune it once your users tell you which features they actually care about) There is an overhead that is added by the heroku system, and it would be interesting to see what impact it has. It might be as simple as having an app deployed on two hosts, run some performance tests and see what the differences are. Has anyone done anything like this yet? On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Mike <mikel...@gmail.com> wrote: > I remember seeing discussions in the past where it was said that > Heroku can scale to handle any site, and that there haven't been any > sites yet that have left due to inability to scale. > > Is this to say that it is plausible that Heroku's platform could > handle running the biggest applications on the Internet, such as a > massive search engine (say, Google) or a massive social network (say, > Facebook)? > > I can see why with the dyno system the scaling is effectively > unlimited, but I'm a little concerned because with only one database > server, it seems like it would be extremely difficult to handle > database-heavy use cases. > > Are there any examples out there of really large and popular sites > (especially those that are heavy on the database load) that are run on > the Heroku platform? > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Heroku" group. > To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<heroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en. > > -- -John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Heroku" group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en.
