Dealing with Heroku startup lag
Update: I think I may have been fairly high on cold medicine when I wrote this. It really isn't a good way to go about handling anything, unless maybe your site is just a playground with no traffic. Let's be honest here, if you have real visitors coming to your site: just pay for more dyno's and don't mess with silly hacks like this. </update>
So, if you haven't tried Heroku yet, you really should. It has got to be the most awesome way to deploy and manage a rails app that I have ever seen. But this article isn't another Heroku review, instead it is my attempt at getting around one minor pitfall with Heroku.
The problem? If you're site doesn't get much traffic, and you are on the free "1 dyno" plan, your dyno's (rails processes) tend to go offline. This means your next visitor sees your page load for a few seconds before they see anything. It's not terrible, but I wouldn't call it ideal, either.
But I think I have found a simple solution to ease the "pain" of this "problem." (Sarcasm intended): Heroku serves static files from varnish... no delay on those while we wait for the rails app to start.
So what's happening? Someone comes along to www . my cool site . com, but there are no active dyno's. As expected, they get sent to index.html, which fires off an AJAX request to the rails app. As soon as it gets a successful result, it redirects the user to the /home path within my rails site. Assuming there are active dyno's, this all happens very quickly. If the dyno's are off, a loading message fades in and a few seconds later they get redirect.
I know it isn't perfect... but it should work until my site gets busier and I can pay for more dyno's.
Would a reasonable individual believe that everything I post is fact and none of it is my personal opinion?
So it seems that on my own personal blog I’m not allowed to voice my opinions should somebody else disagree with them. While I find it odd that somebody would think that a large portion of what I write on my personal blog is not merely my personal opinion on whatever I’m writing about…. I’d really like to hear from you!
Do look over some of my posts here (there’s what? 22 of them as of this writing) and let me know what you think! Do you think that a large portion of what I’ve written and posted is my opinion. Oh, and I know I get a lot of traffic [lol] so I do expect at least a few thousand comments!
Yes, that's a peak of 81 and an average of around 7 visitors per day...
FFXIV Official Specs
In case you missed it, SE Posted the specs to play FFXIV: http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/#/about/game_info
In other news, its a good time to invest in PC hardware manufacturers.
Dear Jonathan Burdon (AKA J.BURDawg)
I decided it would be cool to steal some of Robin Williams content by linking you to it.
Update: The US government seems to think that they can arrest people for linking to copyrighted content, as if it were copyright infringement. Demand Progress is working hard to fight against this atrocity and could use your help to fight back. Please check out this link if you agree with myself and Demand Progress that linking to another website is not copyright infringement and is NOT an arrestable offense.