Is paid heroku faster than free version?

Question

I am currently developing a rails3.2 app and finding Heroku load times exceptionally slow. Can someone please tell me if this is what is to be expected with a paid server on Heroku?

Answer 1

There's no actual speed difference between paid Heroku and free. As others have mentioned, your app will "spin down" after a period of inactivity on the free service, and this does not happen on any level of paid service. The only other performance difference is that your app can only handle as many concurrent connections as there are dynos - so if two users connect to your free app at the same time, one has to wait for the other's request to finish (this is usually minimal and shouldn't bother anything until you start to get some traffic).

That having been said, you should also consider when your app is slow. If it's slow for the first request, and spry for requests after that, it's the spin-down issue and nothing to worry about. If all requests are slow, that's probably something that needs to be troubleshot in the app (though a paid Heroku account is probably still not the answer).