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

http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/02/rap-genius-responds/

by jolie • 13 years ago

176 87 13 years ago

kmfrk3• 13 years ago

Rap Genius gets a (YC) tag, but Heroku don't?

I've always wondered whether the cut-off is time- or success-based. Maybe pg should write a Boolean return function for that. :P

Big props to Rap Genius for explaining the problem so plainly in the article. Unfortunately, many people of prominence in tech aren't even capable of talking about what they do to laymen.

rcavezza• 13 years ago

RE: YC Tag - I think it is because Heroku was acquired.

kmfrk3• 13 years ago

Dropbox don't get the treatment either. It's not that I mind, it's just funny to see the irregularity of labelling.

Probably because people forget how many companies YC fostered.

benologist3• 13 years ago

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?

dustym• 13 years ago

Rails developers

grk• 13 years ago

Speed and ease of development, mostly.

seivan• 13 years ago

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)

eridius• 13 years ago

Just configure Unicorn workers to that

Did you bother to read the article before spouting off half-cocked? RG apparently can't even run Unicorn because they don't have enough available memory.

grey-area2• 13 years ago

Most rails apps use nothing like that amount of memory, the norm is more like 80-150MB. There are various factors which affect how much memory you use and of course if your processes are leaking memory they could easily grow over time and hit any limit. Rails itself is taking up around 30MB, so this is all about the specific app code. Another common problem is loading lots of records into memory (say fetching all your user records at once), this will allocate but then not free lots of memory. Personally I find passenger handles this perfectly well out of the box without having to worry too much about memory usage, routing or other issues, but it does require keeping an eye on the app code as the app grows and fixing any issues that come up with memory usage or response time. Those are not problems specific to rails.

Without knowing the specifics it's hard to say for sure, but I really think RG should try a comparison with running their own real VM (not a web worker on heroku) and see how well it runs. If they'd done that they'd probably find and fix the reasons that their processes are taking so long to respond and taking up such a huge amount of memory, because they'd feel more ownership of those problems, instead of playing a blame game with heroku.

This is not rocket science but it is a series of trade offs and heroku seem to have optimised for short running processes which don't take up lots of memory - many web apps run that way and would be happiest with random routing. Yes heroku could do better but at some point you have to take responsibility for your own ops instead of expecting some service to abstract away all the hard stuff, particularly if you're seeing performance issues and have a busy site. The amount they're paying heroku would easily pay for far more vps than they need.

So in summary, Heroku is not for everyone, and rails isn't really the problem here, so there are no enormous penalties for using it, just the sort of problems you see running any web app.

PommeDeTerre2• 13 years ago

I find it completely astounding that 80+ MB of memory is required to run these Ruby web apps.

I remember doing CGI development in Perl back in the 1990s. We were lucky if our web servers had 32 MB of physical RAM, yet we could easily handle many requests per second to our CGI scripts with a single server. I don't think that the apps then were all that different from what we have today. They still had to interact with databases, perform string manipulation and other logic, and generate and emit HTML.

So it just seems really bad to me that Ruby on Rails requires so much more memory for doing basically the same task. Something is seriously wrong.

thraxil2• 13 years ago

"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 some performance for rapid development, but that seems a bit extreme.

I'm currently running twelve Django apps on one 512MB Rackspace VM. It's a bit tight, and I don't get a lot of traffic on them, but it's basically fine. And that's with Apache worker mpm + mod_wsgi (with an Nginx reverse proxy in front) which probably isn't even the lightest approach. And having been writing apps in Erlang and Go recently, I'm starting to feel like Python/Django are unforgivably bloated in comparison.

fomb• 13 years ago

I have many apps on Heroku, all running Rails, and mostly running on Unicorn, with three or four workers. Most of the apps I've seen pass me by use no more than 150Mb per worker, and there's a fair amount of work going on in many of them with image processing and the like.

512Mb for a single application sounds incredibly high to me.

EDIT: After looking at the docs, it seems like 512Mb isn't even a hard limit: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#memory-behavior

thomasmeeks• 13 years ago

It really depends on your application. A fresh rails app will take up ~30mb of memory (iirc, been a while since I checked). Thirty gems and 11,000 lines of code later, yes, it can spike to 256mb.

If I were to toss down an average, seems like ~100mb is what I see most of the time for non-trivial rails apps.

thraxil2• 13 years ago

OK. That sounds reasonable and pretty comparable to what I expect to see from a full-stack framework.

malyk• 13 years ago

The main Rails app that I work in is a medium sized app and runs at 220mb memory usage on a dyno on averae. It spikes to the 350mb range occasionally probably from image generation with rmagick or PDF generation.

kmfrk3• 13 years ago

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.

ptomato• 13 years ago

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.

Sujan6• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, but Tom Lehman sounds like a real dick to me in this interview. Heroku fucked up royally, sure, but why does RapGenius have to keep bashing them even after they started fixing things?

neebz• 13 years ago

How exactly has Heroku fixed things? I think we can summarize Heroku's response to the whole affair as "oops! we got caught ..sorry!"

ibdknox2• 13 years ago

What did they fix? They've side stepped any real solution for the root problem. As such, the only thing they've "fixed" is new relic, by making it report what is actually happening.

Sujan6• 13 years ago

1. They acknowledged the problem

2. They wrote several blog posts explaining what happened and what is going to happen now (fixing) and in the future (more fixing)

3. They fixed their documentation

4. They helped a third party service to adapt their offering to better help their customers (NewRelic)

5. They offered their advice for better solutions for affected customers (Unicorn)

This sounds a lot like fixing to me.

And from what they did until know, this probably won't be the end of it. So why not just talk to them directly and see if it's enough for you - and if not just go somewhere else?

Sujan6• 13 years ago

Especially the remarks about the costs and alleged fails of NewRelic seem totally wrong to me.

As a very happy NewRelic customer, I can say they did exactly what they advertise: Help monitor the application performance in the server (!). The queueing that now seems to be a problem of Heroku doesn't happen in the server that is processing the request, so by default it can't show the time needed.

Actually I'm quite sure that using one part of NewRelic, RUM (real user monitoring), should have shown the problem quite obviously. It shows how long a user had to wait for the request complete, including DNS lookup and network time. So if users waited longer for answers to their requests than the backend time should indicate, every developer should have taken this as a hint to investigate further.

Well, even using the application should have been enough to know that something is wrong when NR reports 250ms backend time, but page need at least 1200ms to return first byte to the customer.

makomk• 13 years ago

Errrm, unless I'm entirely mistaken the problem is that the queueing does happen in the server that's processing the request, and New Relic just doesn't report it.

busterarm3• 13 years ago

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 line.

brown9-23• 13 years ago

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

hncommenter13• 13 years ago

If I have a problem with my ISP or my car dealer, nobody bats an eye at a blog post or an online complaint about the service.

But if I'm a customer of an admired former startup to whom I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, I'm not allowed to go public with my complaints when I--and maybe hundreds of others--have been deceived and have suffered intentionally worse service than what I was promised?

I find the "enforced positiveness/optimism" of the startup community very disheartening. The essence of engineering is honesty (preferably quantified) about capabilities and limitations of systems. In this case, a former startup owned by a public company deceived their customers and then papered over (my impression) a valid, quantitatively-documented customer complaint once it became public.

Tom should be commended for speaking out. If he's right, dozens of startups have spent far more of their precious and limited capital on excess dynos and monitoring tools that could have been better spent elsewhere. I can't imagine a better service to the startup community than making this sort of thing public.

gfodor• 13 years ago

I would be pretty pissed if I had sunk tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours chasing ghosts. If you're a startup every dollar and every hour lost is especially costly. If Rap Genius ends up going under from running out of money it's impossible to say that this Heroku nonsense isn't at least partially to blame. If Heroku didn't give them the run-around they would have jumped onto EC2 and this problem and the costs it caused would have been completely avoided.

hashset• 13 years ago

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!

wmf4• 13 years ago

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.

brown9-23• 13 years ago

You have to feel comfortable that those people will generally give you good value for your money (since you can’t literally observe everything they do) and that they will tell you when something’s wrong as soon as they know, rather than covering it up.

I used to feel this way about Heroku, and I might again in the future, but I don’t right now.

I have a hard time understanding why, for all the money Rap Genius pays Heroku, they don't simply set up their own instances on EC2 and run the app there themselves. It seems like for a few days work with Puppet or Chef you could automate getting your code onto dozens of EC2 instances and installing the necessary tools/server processes, plus you don't have to complain anymore about how you can't run Unicorn.

Yes I get that there is a certain amount of value in being able to pay someone else to do all these things for you and saving time - but if you aren't happy with the result and the value given the money you are paying (and RG is not), then at a certain point it's time to just bite the bullet and fix things yourselves instead of continuing to be hamstrung by problems that the hosting provider won't/can't fix. There comes a point where you get large enough, and you are paying enough to Heroku, that it would be worth it to do things yourself and eliminate the problems.

rubyrescue• 13 years ago

This is so true. The fact of the matter is that Rap Genius has obviously had to have someone spend a ton of time diagnosing problems with Heroku - and is objectively cheaper just to host some servers compared to Heroku dynos

This is why I always tell people that Heroku is actually NOT a good solution if you truly need scale. They're good for staging, launch, and an early traffic emergency or two. After that, ONCE YOU NEED TO SCALE, it's cheaper just to run your own servers, because the problem that Heroku is solving for you becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of your overall oeprations budget.

brown9-23• 13 years ago

Also worth considering how much time of RG's has been spent not just diagnosing Heroku issues, but giving interviews and writing blog posts about the ordeal. Using Heroku might allow them to spend zero time on "ops" but they've spent some non-zero time now just talking about and raising awareness of this issue!

oijaf888• 13 years ago

Yeah you would think the cost savings from EC2 and the 60K they spent on New Relic would cover paying for a quality sysadmin to run that stuff.

znowi• 13 years ago

I agree with this point, however, how Rap Genius spends its money isn't an issue here. Whatever the reason, they paid and expected to get an adequate service from the company, which they didn't. And on top of this, they found the shady practice at work. And this is a big fucking issue, if you ask me.

andrewvc• 13 years ago

Fact of a matter w/ anything outsourced is that you can outsource responsibility, but you can't outsource accountability.

Ultimately RG's devs are responsible for their choice to leave all the admin work up to heroku.

JangoSteve• 13 years ago

I have a hard time understanding why, for all the money Rap Genius pays Heroku, they don't simply set up their own instances on EC2 and run the app there themselves.

Who says they won't do that now?

Obviously when they started, they had no idea they'd have these problems or that they'd spend so much time diagnosing them, because Heroku told them that they wouldn't have these problems to begin with.

sologoub2• 13 years ago

This entire thing against Heroku is so disingenuous... The fact that New Relic didn't expose these metrics is not great, but has very little to do with Rap Genius team not knowing about the metric.

Apparently, the fact that requests can be queued at Dyno level was common public knowledge back in 2011! Here's a quote from Stackoverflow answer:

"Your best indication if you need more dynos (aka processes on Cedar) is your heroku logs. Make sure you upgrade to expanded logging (it's free) so that you can tail your log.

You are looking for the heroku.router entries and the value you are most interested is the queue value - if this is constantly more than 0 then it's a good sign you need to add more dynos. Essentially this means than there are more requests coming in than your process can handle so they are being queued. If they are queued too long without returning any data they will be timed out."

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8428998/276328

When you use a PaaS, it doesn't mean you don't need to be serious about it and completely forget about all technical aspects. Granted, it should have been included with New Relic from day one, but hardly justifies such a direct and persistent attack on Heroku.

amatix• 13 years ago

From the article, it sounds like they were well aware of the logs & queue values, but they were misleading:

Their logs are STILL incorrect. Here’s a sample line:

  2013-03-02T15:41:24+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path=/Asap-rocky-pretty-flacko-lyrics host=rapgenius.comfwd="157.55.33.98" dyno=web.234 queue=0 wait=0ms connect=3ms service=366ms status=200 bytes=25582

Those queue and wait parameters will always read 0, even if the actual value is 20000ms. And this has been the case for years.

sologoub2• 13 years ago

Interesting... just ran my own test and looks like I have jumped to conclusion too fast. NewRelic and the queue data do not seem to match, so I have some more reading to do.

vannevar• 13 years ago

The problem wasn't that queuing delay was impossible to detect. The problem was that the documentation described a specific load balancing setup that would have guaranteed better performance per dyno, and that setup was not in fact what was being delivered. It was clearly a material misrepresentation, and in any other service context would constitute a deceptive trade practice. That Heroku is being defended at all is a testament to the goodwill they've built up in the tech community, but it doesn't change the fact that they misrepresented their service, even if it was negligence rather than malice.

cbs2• 13 years ago

Here's a quote from Stackoverflow answer

I tend to read (and trust) official documentation before Stack Overflow. I use Stack Overflow and it is great tool and all, but it can be really hit or miss. It doesn't cover every corner of every tech, and unless the answer is availible somewhere on the internet, or the person answering has first-hand experience it can lead to misleading wishy-washy answers.

Ultimately, pointing to SO you're lowering the expectations of a paid service from "the documentation reflects the product" so damn low to the point of "users should read everything googleable about the product they're using, and trust that OVER the official docs. Including mailing list posts from 2011 and a stack overflow question that asks a different question than you're asking"

aelaguiz• 13 years ago

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.

wmf4• 13 years ago

Nah, I think Heroku is pretty principled. There's no amount of money you can pay them to get working load balancing or multi-region reliability.

ollysb• 13 years ago

Yes I got bitten by their lack of customer support a couple of weeks ago. I did a release and the rails asset pipeline stopped precompiling the resources. I'd tested in staging so this came as a bit of a surprise. I promptly rolled back to the previous release(had been working fine for days) only to find that that now was broken as well. With my production app now broken I fired off a request for support. At this time we were running 8 dynos and 3 workers(not to mention a bunch of addons). This was also Saturday afternoon, which turned out to be a bit of a problem, I received an auto-response saying that support was only available Monday to Friday! Paying the premium rates for heroku and not receiving support for a production failure really was a bitter pill to swallow. We're running fast at the moment and don't have time to switch off but when we do will certainly be looking at the options.

plasma• 13 years ago

I think it's obvious that Rap Genius would be happy with a "I see how its a problem, let us fix it" quote from Heroku - just acknowledging that there is an underlying problem and that there is a future on the platform.

paul_f• 13 years ago

We were promised flying cars and got online Rap lyrics instead.

tvladeck• 13 years ago

It doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient RG was with their Rails app. It's almost certainly true that they could have done things better on their end, and their performance penalty wouldn't have been as severe -- but that really is not the point.

The point is that one company promised a level of service with their product that they did not deliver, and the difference was significant and persistent. The fact that the consumer could have used the product more efficiently is immaterial to that fact.

Other things that don't matter:

-that RG could/should move to another provider. That is of course their choice now, but it does not change the money they've spent and wasted with Heroku.

-that the routing problem is hard. If anything this makes it worse - it's a hard problem so people would pay a lot of money for a solution. What matters is that Heroku claimed to solve it and did not.

-that other consumers of the product managed to figure this out before RG. Heroku was still advertising through their documentation that they offered a routing solution, and they did not make clear to their customers that a significant feature of their product was now different.

Furthermore, Heroku appeared to obfuscate this fact and shift blame to the customer during the time RG was trying to diagnose their issues.

Now, by attacking RG's tone, Heroku have employed argument-level DH2 [1], which at least according to pg is not even worth considering. They have at least acknowledged their mistake, but to me that means that by extension they have sold something that they did not deliver on. The only honest way to move forward is for Heroku to offer some kind of compensation to the customers that were affected.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

DeepDuh• 13 years ago

Yes, the comment quality on HN seems to be quite bad when it comes to Heroku threads. Why do so many CS professionals appear to be attaching themselves emotionally to software tools? That's pretty much what I have to conclude if you can't admit that this PaaS provider has screwed up and deserves more scrutiny when deciding for the platform of your next project/migration.

Isn't one of the great things about the Software startup scene that we can decide freely on what tools to use? Except for very niche markets we always have alternatives, even if it means a bit more work on our sides.

benologist3• 13 years ago

Everyone knows Heroku screwed up, there not much left to say about that part of this story... so then we get to the application.

PommeDeTerre2• 13 years ago

I'm not really certain why, but there is a much greater tendency for members of the Ruby community to get emotionally attached to certain tools or services, and to defend them unequivocally, even when this is completely unjustified.

I haven't seen this to such a high degree with any other programming language/platform/technology community. Yes, there are developers in these communities who do prefer certain tools, but they're generally reasonable when it comes to criticism of these tools, or the suggestion of using alternatives. It's much rarer to see this when dealing with Ruby developers.

On more than one occasion, I've witnessed several different Ruby developers yell and scream in meetings when told they can't use a particular library or framework. I've never seen this kind of reaction from the many Java, C#, C, C++, Fortran, COBOL, Ada, Perl or Python developers I've worked with over the years, for instance.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

So what happens when Heroku says "Ok, fine, we can't give you the service you want, please download any data you want to keep and we'll re-allocate those resources to our other customers in 60 or 90 days." ?

This has taken on the patina of a really huge fight between operations and engineering with nobody to step in and say "Hey, we both want to make progress here, let see what we can do." there is no common point of contact here sadly.

What is the end goal? One of these companies being out of business? What? Its pretty clear that Heroku doesn't have any ideas on how to implement routing the way Rap Genius believed it worked, they even said as much. So what is the next step?

wmf4• 13 years ago

For $60,000 per month they can't create a mode where all your dynos are behind a single HAProxy with "intelligent" least-connections load balancing?

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

That was what they said, now I'm trying to find it again. When they talked about changing Bamboo they said "we can't get this to scale, so we switched paths, sorry we didn't document it well."

dtweney• 13 years ago

Here's the other side of the story, from Heroku: http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/28/heroku-chief-opens-up-abou...

woah• 13 years ago

oh snap! R to the G startin some beef! when's the freestyle rap battle going down?

dkhenry• 13 years ago

This is the tech world equivalent of tabloids. Please don't promote this mindless back and forth, If you have a problem with Heroku leave and go to one of the other providers. If you don't stay and push them to fix this problem. Either way stop pretending this is some huge event that we must mindlessly obsess over

jfim2• 13 years ago

Indeed, especially considering it's painfully obvious that the problem isn't on Heroku's side but rather on their app's dismal performance. You should be able to easily do a couple of dozen requests per second; this is the kind of performance we're getting out of a single Heroku dyno on a dynamic page with no caching:

  $ ab -n 1000 -c 20 https://*****-staging.herokuapp.com/**********
  This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
  Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
  Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
  
  Benchmarking *****-staging.herokuapp.com (be patient)
  Completed 100 requests
  Completed 200 requests
  Completed 300 requests
  Completed 400 requests
  Completed 500 requests
  Completed 600 requests
  Completed 700 requests
  Completed 800 requests
  Completed 900 requests
  Completed 1000 requests
  Finished 1000 requests
  
  
  Server Software:        
  Server Hostname:        *****-staging.herokuapp.com
  Server Port:            443
  SSL/TLS Protocol:       TLSv1/SSLv3,AES256-SHA,2048,256
  
  Document Path:          /**********
  Document Length:        9670 bytes
  
  Concurrency Level:      20
  Time taken for tests:   7.130 seconds
  Complete requests:      1000
  Failed requests:        0
  Write errors:           0
  Total transferred:      10034000 bytes
  HTML transferred:       9670000 bytes
  Requests per second:    140.25 [#/sec] (mean)
  Time per request:       142.606 [ms] (mean)
  Time per request:       7.130 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
  Transfer rate:          1374.25 [Kbytes/sec] received
  
  Connection Times (ms)
                min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
  Connect:       55   59  31.7     58    1057
  Processing:    37   82  43.8     66     308
  Waiting:       35   74  42.7     57     298
  Total:         92  141  53.4    124    1096
  
  Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
    50%    124
    66%    138
    75%    153
    80%    166
    90%    199
    95%    239
    98%    282
    99%    301
   100%   1096 (longest request)

Edit: formatting.

drewcrawford• 13 years ago

> this is the kind of performance we're getting out of a single Heroku dyno on a dynamic page with no caching

If you read the original article[0], you would know that this is a problem that only affects apps with large number of dynos.

I have not done queuing theory in a long time, but my initial sense is that the math on this one will be generalization of the birthday problem [1], which is Wiki-notable on the sole basis that the probability of sharing a birthday (or in our case, the probability of queueing a request) is far, far higher than ordinary people anticipate for N above 23. Assuming I've captured the essence of the problem correctly, you would see a sharp drop in performance when you start to saturate about 20-30 dynos.

Given that there's an entire Wikipedia article on the sole basis that the behavior of these mathematical functions are nonintuitive, I think it is pretty fair to give RapGenius a pass at being surprised by the math as well.

[0] http://rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-lyrics [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

jonmc12• 13 years ago

Why does Lehman say Heroku is "one of a kind in the world"? Isn't Cloud Foundry equivalent? http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-differences-between-C...

olefoo2• 13 years ago

I'm not Heroku's biggest fan, and haven't used it for more than a couple of one-off fiddles to play with the platform.

But, my sympathy is going to them, because what I see coming from Rap Genius looks like classic blame-game. So a vendors documentation was unclear and your server sucked publicly for some time? Shameful. You didn't know about it because you expected your vendors to give you extra hand-holding? That's really rough. Instead of fixing the issues and moving on, you make it the one thing that everyone thinks about when your company is mentioned... that might not be in your best long term interests.

After this, I would be hesitant to enter into any sort of relations with Rap Genius, and I'm not that sure of what they do or what their product is.

gregd• 13 years ago

I'm having a hard time understanding your justification for your sympathy going to Heroku.

RG is paying for PaaS from Heroku based on documentation, sales pitches, etc. They're also paying good money for the tools necessary to make business decisions based on data collected from that PaaS. Just given the realm of customer service, why wouldn't you expect "hand-holding" from your vendor? Why is it unreasonable to have that expectation? Why is it acceptable for your vendor to have a fall down response in "optimize your web-stack"? How do you expect them to "fix" this problem without the vendors involvement? What did you expect them to do, change platforms? How are they supposed to "move on" when the issue hasn't been resolved?

Have we gotten so far away from customer service with the likes of Google, that we don't even know what that means anymore? Are we to settle for mediocrity from any PaaS because our expectations are just too high?

olefoo2• 13 years ago

To take an analogy from another field that, this is like a cinematographer getting bent out of shape and angry at the camera leasing company because he used a film stock his camera wasn't correctly calibrated for. From what I've read about it, it sounds like the setup on the servers had some issues that made the queue time issue into a problem where it wouldn't necessarily be for another, or even most other, customers. If you are or want to be, known as a technical company, that means you have to take responsibility for your mistakes, even if your mistake was thinking that the vendor was going to catch and fix all the mistakes and bugs in the service that they are providing to you. Building web services that are performant, stable and economical is hard work; you can't take your eye off the ball, and you can't just blindly hope that vendors will take care of your shit for you, you have to know what you're buying, and what you should be getting.

And, if you're going to go public with your complaints, it's best to do so in an understated, fact based manner. In this case, Rap Genius comes off like a guy screaming at the waiter in a fancy restaurant. They may be displeased, they may even be right about the choucroutes en sel being salted cabbage; but lot's of people around think they're making an ass of themselves.

neya• 13 years ago

Just curious - Why after all this mess, didn't Rap genius recommend Engine Yard (Heroku's competitor). Is it because they had similar issues too, or did they simply ignore not trying to switch over to a different provider altogether? Just curious.

aptwebapps• 13 years ago

Seems like it would just muddy the waters further if they recommended someone else.

ctovision• 13 years ago

Heroku should make this right if they want long term success.

spronkey• 13 years ago

I'm astounded at the number of "$60k hires a good sysadmin and some EC2 resources" comments. You guys clearly don't understand exactly what Heroku (or a similar service) offers - providing it works.

There's a concept called a Bus Factor. Basically, it's the number of people who, if hit by a bus and made otherwise unusable, it would take to completely rail your business.

With $60k spent on a single sysadmin and an army of EC2, that's a pretty effing small bus factor - 1. So... that one guy gets taken out of action, and they're more or less toast? Yeah, no. Heroku gives them a massive bus factor for perhaps a little bit more money than it would take to cheap it themselves. It's a cheap way to avert risk.

They're probably at the size now where they could handle taking it in-house, but you've still then got to factor in hiring, developing the procedures for ops inhouse etc., and migrating. It's not easy to just flip the switch.

In any case, Heroku's behaviour is pretty shoddy. Though, knowing how much of a pain documentation is, I'm not surprised. I don't think they realised just how bad the change from intelligent to random routing actually was - and didn't treat it as such. This is giving them benefit of doubt though, because the other option is that they didn't publicise it precisely because they knew how bad it is. Scary thought.

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