how to increase memory on heroku?

Question

My rails app is using too much memory:

Process running mem=701M(136.9%)
Error R14 (Memory quota exceeded)

Until I solve the problem, how can I increase the memory size on heroku?

Will adding more web dynos will help split the memory?

Thanks

Answer 1

I have the same issue with one of my clients. Sometimes digging into memory leaks can be a difficult task especially when the source of the leak could be in a third party code.

What I do is each few hours restart several dynos. I picked up non high traffic hours to do the restarts.

1. create a cron:

   namespace :utils do
     desc "Restart app by process and time table"
     task :restart => :environment do
       time_hash = {
           1 => %w[web.1 web.2 web.3],
           3 => %w[web.4 web.5 web.6],
           5 => %w[web.7 web.8 web.9],
           7 => %w[web.10 web.11 web.12],
           16 => %w[web.13 web.14 web.1],
           18 => %w[web.2 web.3 web.4],
           20 => %w[web.5 web.6 web.7],
           22 => %w[web.8 web.9 web.10],
           0 => %w[web.11 web.12 web.13 web.14],
       }
       processes = time_hash[Time.now.hour]
       processes.each {|process| restart_process(process)} if processes
     end
   
     def restart_process(name)
       puts "restarting process #{name}:"
       heroku = Heroku::Client.new(ENV['APP_USERNAME'], ENV['APP_PASSWORD'])
       heroku.ps_restart(ENV['APP_NAME'], :ps => name)
     end
   end
   

2. Use the hourly scheduler (heroku addon) to run this cron.

Answer 2

You can't. Dynos have a 512M.B quotas, even if you get more dynos you will still hit the same wall. Fix your memory leaks.

Each dyno gets 512MB of memory to operate within. Most applications will fit comfortably within this allowance, and as a developer you need not worry about memory at all.

In some cases, your dyno may reach or exceed that 512MB amount. Typically this is because of a memory leak in your application, in which case you may wish to use a memory profiling tool such as Oink for Ruby or Heapy for Python to track down the leak and fix it.

Dynos that exceed 512MB of memory usage will display an R14 error in the logs, like this:

Answer 3

You have a hard limit of 512Mb of RAM to play with no exceptions. This memory is on a per dyno basis. Therefore you will not be able to deploy your application onto Heroku as it stands with it's substantial RAM usage.

I rarely see applications topping a couple of hundred Mb of RAM so you really need to look at the source of the problem.

With your RAM usage, even on a typical VPS you'd struggle to run more than a couple of processes at once.

Answer 4

From the docs, yeah. That should do it..

"Each dyno gets 512MB of memory to operate within."

http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos