Rap Genius responds to Heroku's apology

While RapGenius it right to point out that Heroku was incorrect in describing how their load balancing works. It seems off to blame this exclusively for their performance problems. Plenty of high traffic sites not on Heroku operate just fine using nginx's upstream load balancing, which is simple round robin load balancing, paying no attention to how many requests are being handled currently by a backend.<p>What seems particularly odd is that rap genius appears to be using their Heroku dynos to serve their css, javascript and certain images. So loading the homepage appears to make about 12 requests that hit their dynos, rather than 1.<p>If you were looking for low hanging fruit to reduce load on the dinos for a high traffic site, this seems like an obvious place to start, rather than jumping straight to a 'smart' load balancing solution.

I'm confused by this blog format. This seems to be a posting of the apology not a response. Did I miss something?

Love the use of their product to respond. Haha.

Not sure if this is called for. Heroku has a performance issue and their documentation had a mistake. They accepted everything, apologized and are working to resolve it. What am I missing here?

<i>Come on</i> Rap Genius, please stop treating your blog posts like song lyrics.

The most interesting thing about this for me is the YC company vs. YC company fighting.

So what is the consensus at this point? Stay away from Heroku if you are running a Rails app?

The most amazing part of this situation, to me at least, is that a site devoted to explaining rap lyrics is lucrative enough to pay $20k/month in hosting. Imagine if they actually had a product!

Not sure how this works but... Is the actual response in the green hightlights? Are all the green highlights from the same person? I think they are. But then, who made the yellow highlights?

I don't think this was necessary. The first post by RapGenius was great and was a really good way to point out an issue with a commonly used product. However now that Heroku has come to them hat in hand and promised some sort of resolution this seemed unnecessarily petty. Especially the one line about the date of the report, that's just pedantic.<p>At this point in the issue RG and Heroku should be communicating privately, not via blog post.

&#62; I’m convinced that the best path forward is for one of your developers to work closely with [redacted] to modernize and optimize your web stack. If you invest this time I think it’s very likely you’ll end up with an app that performs the way you want it to at a price within your budget<p>So... Heroku's CTO acknowledged there was a problem with their stack, and offered to help RapGenius modernize and optimize it. And RapGenius quibbles on the word "yesterday"?<p>While I do appreciate RapGenius raising the issue publicly to bring better accountability to Heroku. Their response to Heroku's response ought to have been along the lines of: "Hurray! Everyone's boat is rising with the tide." Not this.

"Your Recommended Daily Allowance of Drama."

Classless and pointless.<p>At this point I think rapgenius is just using this as a way to get attention/traffic.