Your site doesn't work for me. It doesn't matter what I enter, (I tried Delphi, C#, Visual Basic, Windows) I only get "No result found".
Also your Tutorial Video doesn't match your current design. The colour scheme is off and instead of a "Generate" dropdown button there is a plain "Create" Button.
I'm on Chrome Version 55.0.2883.87 m on Windows. I turned of uBlock Origin for your site.
You may be experiencing some caching problems. Also around the time you checked I was in the middle of pushing the swift site to Heroku so that may have introduced some issues as well. The new site has a "Create" button with no drop down — Can you please re-try https://www.gitignore.io/.
OK, I tried it at home. Another PC, another Provider, Chrome Version 56.0.2924.87, no uBlock, I even tried it in Inkognito Mode. The result is the same. https://imgur.com/a/Bo4Kq
> like the OP mentioned, it's a static site.
It's a RoR app. Content might not change but it's still an app with a database etc.
Although it is a RoR app you still can cache a lot of thing out of the box. As others have pointed out, just using cloudflare as CDN would already help somewhat.
Recently I've seen a blog post about a company using RoR for generating a completely static website. Unfortunately I can't find it anymore.
The naive approach would be to use "wget -r" a locally running and "rsync" the generated html to the server but there might be some gotchas with that.
Can you be more specific on how Swift doubles/triples your performance? Are you using a Swift backend framework for web serving?
Ah yeah. I'm going to write a blog post on this in a few weeks, but basically I'm running tests using `wrk`. Here are the results I just got with a test (this is actually a bit abnormal), but note the requests per second, latency, and the transfer speed per second.
wrk -t12 -c400 -d10s https://gitignoreio-stage-swift.herokuapp.com
Running 10s test @ https://gitignoreio-stage-swift.herokuapp.com
12 threads and 400 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 265.88ms 78.37ms 1.29s 84.87%
Req/Sec 119.55 39.81 254.00 67.32%
14230 requests in 10.09s, 79.67MB read
Requests/sec: 1410.00
Transfer/sec: 7.89MB
wrk -t12 -c400 -d10s https://gitignoreio-stage-node.herokuapp.com
Running 10s test @ https://gitignoreio-stage-node.herokuapp.com
12 threads and 400 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 945.65ms 136.05ms 1.29s 73.12%
Req/Sec 35.57 21.97 140.00 65.52%
3783 requests in 10.09s, 19.31MB read
Requests/sec: 374.81
Transfer/sec: 1.91MB
[1] - https://vapor.codes
1. GitHub is footing the bill — I'm paying for gitignore.io (although it's only costing me the annual domain)
2. The site uses 3 Dynos — Currently gitignore.io uses 1 Dyno on the free tier and I've recently moved the backend from Node to Swift to double / triple network performance based on my preliminary testing. I don't know why the site needs 3 Dynos because like the OP mentioned, it's a static site. I also use Cloudflare as a CDN which could dramatically improve git-scm's caching layer. It's not that helpful for me as most of my requests are dynamically created, but for a static site, it would drastically reduce Dyno traffic.
3. Access to Heroku seems to be an issue — I ran into the same problem and I'm finishing up a full continuous integration process to build and test my site on Travis. I basically want to approve a pull request and have the site fully tested though my Heroku pipeline, then have the PR landed in production.
4. Traffic - I don't know how many users he's got but I'm seeing about 60,000 MAU's and about 750,000 requests a month.
* Jason Long helped design my site and logo as well.