Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io
by snacktaster on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:54PM
(#35047436)
I don't know the details of how Heroku implements their hosted postgres service, but I'm _guessing_ that it's just a bunch of PG servers running on EC2 instances. There's probably a lot of CPU stealing "noisy neighbors" going on. But yeah, I've also experienced Heroku's PG databases being dog-slow compared to RDS for the same workloads.
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io
by mixmastamyk on Monday March 06, 2023 @05:55PM
(#35048982)
They're probably using older or cheaper instance types. By not upgrading while charging the same or more over time, one can skim more profit.
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io
by karmelapple on Monday March 06, 2023 @04:53PM
(#35048206)
I have run the experiment, and Crunchy Data’s Postgres servers are 4X more bang for the buck than Heroku’s.
I let some folks at Heroku know this who are product managers, and they are investigating it… but I would be shocked if Heroku gets a big performance improvement anytime in, say, 2023.
20X seems like a lot for RDS, though I’d be curious to learn more! We are switching to Crunchy because of that clear cost/performance difference you mention.
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io
by jrochkind1 on Monday March 06, 2023 @07:57PM
(#35050088)
I would be kind of shocked if heroku gets a big performance improvement ever again. It seems the owners have decided to basically freeze it.
Heroku PostgreSQL is very simple, yes. But once you need non-trivial scale it's expensive and extremely non-performant. Even a medium-sized RDS will outperform Heroku's most expensive database offering by 20x in my experience. My company doesn't even run PG on Heroku anymore. We have a VPC/Private Space connection to AWS Aurora because the cost/performance difference is so extreme.