This is a civil matter. Probably under torts law, especially if there's anything in California/US torts law that resembles Australia's tort of "misleading and deceptive conduct".
Fraud and torts are different. And to forestall the next obvious point: torts and contracts are different.
> I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here.
A refund.
Heroku's selling pitch is linear scalability. Rent 1 dyno, get ~ (1 dyno / Σ dynos) improvement in performance. Rap Genius demonstrated that they were getting exponentially worse increments of added performance per dyno added.
> If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?
This is orthogonal to the question of whether Heroku acted in a legal way.
> Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?
Courts don't worry their heads with strawman hypotheticals.
Fraud is usually a criminal matter.
This is a civil matter. Probably under torts law, especially if there's anything in California/US torts law that resembles Australia's tort of "misleading and deceptive conduct".
Fraud and torts are different. And to forestall the next obvious point: torts and contracts are different.
> I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here.
A refund.
Heroku's selling pitch is linear scalability. Rent 1 dyno, get ~ (1 dyno / Σ dynos) improvement in performance. Rap Genius demonstrated that they were getting exponentially worse increments of added performance per dyno added.
> If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?
This is orthogonal to the question of whether Heroku acted in a legal way.
> Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?
Courts don't worry their heads with strawman hypotheticals.
(IANAL, TINLA)