How do I improve app performance on AppHarbor? [closed]

Question

I have an application hosted on AppHarbor that is visited a few times a day with a light load.

The performance experience is a SLOW first page load as the dormant worker process wakes up. Subsequent page loads are fast.

I want to reduce the amount of time for the initial load. Will buying additional instances solve this issue, or should I look towards a dedicated host

Answer 1

You app pool will be spun down after 20 minutes of inactivity, this is standard IIS behaviour.

To avoid this, you can upgrade from Canoe to either the Catamaran or Yacht plans. Web apps on those plan don't idle (adding a custom hostname, SSL or running more than one dyno on the Canoe plan will still give you an idling app).

You can also circumvent the idling by using services like Pingdom and StillAlive to generate requests for your site. But upgrading from Canoe is fairer to AppHarbor.