

Google AppEngine or Heroku? - dublinclontarf

Considering you can run Ruby on both, I know quite a few here would have experience with Heroku, but what about AppEngine, preferably with Ruby on it?
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darshan
Until the loading request (spinning up a JVM) performance issues get sorted
out, I can't see any serious site running Ruby on App Engine. It's actually an
awesome platform, except for one detail -- which is _enormous_ : waiting 15+
seconds for a JVM to start up and respond to a request when either 1) your
site hasn't been visited it the past 5 minutes or so, or 2) your current
number of JVMs aren't sufficient, so another is needed. You're pretty much
guaranteed to run into one of these scenarios regularly -- the first if your
site is low-traffic and the second if your site is relatively high-traffic.
Either way, users don't stick around and wait 15 seconds for a page to load.

Other than that, I like the App Engine architecture much better than Heroku's,
although there's a lot to like at Heroku as well.

The good news for app engine is that Google has announced planned support for
this (1) feature in their roadmap (2). Allowing us to pay to reserve an extra
JVM at all times would eliminate the issue.

(1)
[http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=24...](http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=2456)
(2) <http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html>

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mark_l_watson
I use Ruby a lot, and I always deploy Ruby web apps to Heroku. This is all
about loading request times. Right now, I think that the best bet for AppEngin
is coding in Python. Since I don't much use Python I have been experimenting
with using Java + Objectify instead of JDO: this gets my request loding times
down to usually just over 1 second. I have two writeups about this on my blog.

I have spent quite a lot of time trying JRuby + Sinatra + AppEngine. Lots of
good work but not really ready. Google needs a paid for option to always keep
at least one JVM for an application spun-up.

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hajrice
Tried both. Heroku is way better, hands down. All the problems I encounter
with heroku are fixed(thanks to the awesome support team) in a matter of
hours.

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friendstock
yes, I went to the JRuby on App Engine meetup a few weeks ago, and my
conclusion was ... not ready for primetime. There's a long loading time for
the initial request (if your server is lightly loaded). Also, the speaker
couldn't name a real site that was deployed using JRuby on App Engine.

Note that for JRuby on AppEngine, you need to use DataMapper (instead of
ActiveRecord) -- that actually looked pretty cool.

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cydork
Personally my experience with appengine and ruby was not stable. Things break
too often. On the other hand Heroku is much easier to setup, and update.

