I'm really puzzled by this. A single dedicated large .NET box (16GB RAM and 6 Core Processor, 1TB raid, etc.) runs $150 a month. When I was looking at PaaS, Heroku came in more than five times that much for similar capability. $1,000 a month gets me SIX of these dedicated boxes that can be tied together as needed.

Why was your setup so much more for dedicated that you could _save_ that much, much less why you would be spending that much in the first place?

I'd actually be very surprised if NodeJS running on Heroku (which is built on EC2) performs better than compiled .NET code running on dedicated Windows hardware.

The equivalent in .NET I guess would be BackgroundWorkers that are independently prefetching the data required most of the time but I could never get them to Just Work.

Specifically for my use case 99+ percent of requests receive some data, do some light manipulations and then push the data to redis about 8,000 to 12,000 times a second. With .NET I could only push to locally running software instances because anything remote couldn't keep up with the connection volume (without throwing even more hardware at the problem).

It's really just like using any memcached or the built in .net caching rather than a write through one, new data reaches each dyno either via the periodic refresh or when it tries to create that record and finds it already exists. Writes are done immediately and the caches don't get updated because there's 8 - 16 dynos and why bother updating the single dyno that created it.

I did originally use redis pub/sub to push out updates to everything but I ended up removing it because it was unnecessary.

Here's some example code, it pre-fetches all the leaderboards (not scores) every 30 seconds: http://pastebin.com/asq6eExu

Higher up in the same script is the api for the leaderboard data with stuff like: http://pastebin.com/gsfvsZsv