Are the dyno restarts on Heroku simultaneous? - heroku

I read on Herokus website that dynos will be restarted about every 24 hours.
If you have for example two web-dynos is there a chance that they will be restarted simultaneously?
Thanks for your time!

According to heroku:
"The cycling happens once every 24 hours (plus up to 216 random
minutes, to prevent every dyno for an application from restarting at
the same time)."
Source: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos

Heroku restarts dynos randomly -- sometimes multiple times per day. Don't count on it being simultaneous!

Related

Will Heroku dyno automatic restarts kill running processing on my application?

I have an application that is hosted on Heroku. The application has a process that is run on the server, that the user has the ability to start and stop. Once the user clicks 'Start', the process is supposed to stay running until the user presses 'Stop'. The functionality of the app should allow that the process can be run for extended periods of times (6 months or so) continuously.
I have deployed my app on a Heroku free dyno. While reading the Heroku documentation, I came across this page that states that Heroku Dynos are restarted automatically every 24 hours. Here is the relevant passage:
Dynos are also restarted (cycled) at least once per day to help maintain the health of applications running on Heroku. Any changes to the local filesystem will be deleted. The cycling happens once every 24 hours (plus up to 216 random minutes, to prevent every dyno for an application from restarting at the same time). Manual restarts (heroku ps:restart) and releases (deploys or changing config vars) will reset this 24 hour period. Cycling happens for all dynos, including one-off dynos, so dynos will run for a maximum of 24 hours + 216 minutes. If you have multiple dynos, they should cycle at different times based on the random 0 to 216 minutes difference. If you continually make changes to your application without a 24 hour gap, you won’t see cycling at all.
Does this mean that the user process that he/she has started will automatically be stopped when the dyno restarts? If yes, does it automatically resume the user process where it left off?
If not, I will have to find a different hosting solution since the process may need to be run 24x7x365.
Does this mean that the user process that he/she has started will automatically be stopped when the dyno restarts?
Yes it does. As it will when you change config variables, or deploy updates, or add / remove addons.
If yes, does it automatically resume the user process where it left off?
No it doesn't. Any safe-and-resume behaviour you have to implement in your application. When stopping processes, Heroku will send them a SIGTERM signal and give them 30 seconds to safe their work.
If not, I will have to find a different hosting solution since the process may need to be run 24x7x365.
I doubt that there is any hosting solution that will give you what you want. In a cloud environment restarts are a thing that happens all the time, at least for you updating your application, bugfixes, security fixes. Every hosting provider or platform that provides you with 24x7x365 uptime will also restart and replace your dynos all the time.

Heroku website only loads slowly the first time, even after clearing local cache?

I have a website hosted on heroku. Whenever I load it for the first time after awhile (I haven't figured out the exact interval yet, be it days or hours), it takes upwards of 15 seconds to load. Subsequent loads are <1second, even if I clear the cache completely and open it in an incognito tab.
Why might this be? It almost seems like some kind of DNS issue but I haven't really got a clue. I don't know how to troubleshoot something like this. The situation seems to be the same even on other computers at other locations.
Quoting the Heroku docs:
If an app has a free web dyno, and that dyno receives no web traffic in a 30-minute period, it will sleep.
When the dyno receives traffic again, it will take a few seconds to wake up, hence the delay you've experienced.
Note that the Heroku free tier also has a maximum number of dyno hours per month. A sleeping dyno doesn't use any hours, but it does when it's active. When the hours are used up, the dyno won't wake up to incoming traffic.
You can see your remaining quota of dyno hours with:
$ heroku ps -a <app name>
Heroku suggests upgrading to a hobby dyno if your app needs to be permanently accessible. More info on https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/free-dyno-hours
On the free tier, Heroku dynos go to sleep if they aren't used after an hour or something like that. They take a few seconds to wake up. Pay for the service and it stops happening, or write a script to ping your site every couple minutes or something.

Heroku Free Tier - Can a single app spend all Dyno quota?

If I only have one active app is it possible that it could spend all free Dyno hours quota?
My app is a PHP process which is always active (while (true) { do_something}). I launch this process as a worker.
I thought the free Dyno hours quota were like real hours so you can spent 24h as max per day. But if I view my remaining free hours quota in two consecutive days using 'heroku ps -a app' command then I get that I am spending more than 24h per day.
Another question, how many hours do you have in a Hobby plan?
If you are running 2 dynos (for example, a web dyno and a worker dyno), they will each use 24 hours, for a total of 48 dyno hours used in a day. Of course in reality it would probably be less than 24 hours each, if the dynos slept for part of the day.
I solved my problem disabling the web Dyno.

Is it possible to stop a Heroku Daily Dyno Restart for a Hobby Dyno

Is it possible to stop a Heroku Daily Dyno Restart for a Hobby Dyno?
My Goal is to stop the Dyno from restarting.
In short, No (with an aside that the restart shouldn't be seen as a bad thing).
From the Heroku Dynos and Dyno Manager Docs
Dynos are also restarted (cycled) at least once per day to help maintain the health of applications running on Heroku. Any changes to the local filesystem will be deleted. The cycling happens once every 24 hours (plus up to 216 random minutes, to prevent every dyno for an application from restarting at the same time).
Cycling happens for all dynos, including one-off dynos, so dynos will run for a maximum of 24 hours + 216 minutes.
In addition, dynos are restarted as needed for the overall health of the system and your app. For example, the dyno manager occasionally detects a fault in the underlying hardware and needs to move your dyno to a new physical location.
Additionally, Dynos Restart if you:
create a new release by deploying new code
change your config vars
change your add-ons
run heroku restart
With Hobby Dynos, the real issue is that inactivity causes the Dyno to sleep throughout the day. From my personal experience, waking up a sleeping dyno can cause a page to take ~30s to load.
There are many solutions to 'ping' the dyno on regular intervals to keep it 'awake'.
An example solution for a Node Server is heroku-self-ping

Upgrade process on Heroku?

If I update an application running on Heroku using git push and this application is running on multiple dynos - how is the upgrade process run by Heroku?
All dynos at the same time?
One after another?
...?
In other words: Will there be a down-time of my "cluster", or will there be a small time-frame where different versions of my app are running in parallel, or ...?
well can not tell the internal state but what i have experienced is
Code push complete
Code compiled (slug is compiled )
After that all dynos get the latest code and get restarted. (restart take up to 30 seconds or so and during this time all requests get queue).
So there will be no down time as during the restart process all the requests get queued and there i dont think that that multiple versions of your code will be running after the deployment.
Everyone says there's 'no downtime' when updating a Heroku app, but for your app this may not be true.
I've recently worked on a reasonably sized Rails app that takes at least 25 seconds to start, and often fails to start inside the 30 seconds that Heroku allows before returning errors to your clients.
During this entire time, your users are waiting for something to happen. 30 seconds is a long time, and they may not be patient enough to wait.
Someone once told me that if you have more than 1 dyno, that they are re-started individually to give you no downtime. This is not true - Heroku Stops all dynos and then Starts all Dynos.
At no time will there be 2 versions of your app running on Heroku

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