Hacker News Reader

Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

Let say your average http request takes 200ms to serve, then with 5 heroku worker dynos you can serve about 10 million requests a day which should comfortably cover the requirements of most startups.

How much do those dynos cost ? - $143/month. That's less than three hours salary for a developer.

If your monthly budget is hundreds of dollars I'm guessing your traffic is low enough you can just use the free tiers of heroku, appfog, etc.

View on HN

10,000,000 requests each day are 115 requests per second. I don't follow your math here with a 200ms CPU time per request.

115/30 is almost 4, which is almost 5; 5*200ms = 1 second;

I guess he meant 10M/mo, not 10M/day.

Yes, my mistake.

Heroku customers don't typically do math when they do capacity planning. That's part of the Operations toolchest they're buying. They just up/down dynos.

Yes, but there's a step before

$143 is money that is missed by a college student, for example.

Better go with something cheaper or the free tiers of Heroku, AWS, etc

You're probably still developing the system, or having only a small amount of requests.

Well the point of all this is that simple scaling math like that doesn't add up because of the queuing latency introduced by heroku's routing layer. But still at that scale your point is valid.

And the real problem is the non-uniformity of the load. If your 10M/mo request start concentrating around weekends, you've got a problem... Except you haven't, as your infrastructure is elastic, and this is the real bonus.

Also, I'd be very afraid to get accidentally hit by HN traffic if I'd host my own server.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com