Why is it taking so long for Meteor to load my data on Heroku?

Question

I am using Meteor on Heroku (free tier) with MongoHQ. My app is very simple right now, it loads 3-4 entries from a Collection, but when I deploy it to Heroku, I am seeing ridiculous load times (1-2 minutes). The HTML is rendered immediately. When I deploy to Meteor.com's free server, load times are a lot lower but still about 15 seconds for 4 tiny pieces of data. I'm not seeing this whatsoever when I deploy locally, app pulls data from the DB right away.

It is worth noting that I don't think it's an "idling" issue for Heroku. Even if I already have one browser window with the app just opened, if I use a different browser and try again I still get 1-2 minute load times. Once the data is loaded, however, performance goes back to being great, I can read and write with no problems.

What am I missing? I'm not seeing any errors in the console, mongo shows several queries in the logs and shows that it is responding quickly with 4 documents, but apparently somewhere in the middle there's a traffic jam. Any help with this is greatly appreciated, if I can't get past this Meteor is useless for my needs right now.

UPDATE: I've been watching it closely in Firebug, and it looks like the performance is largely inconsistent. Sometimes a simple refresh will take 1 minute, sometimes it will take 10 seconds. But what I've noticed is that the times when its slow, it GETs the sockjs/info file, then right after that the sockjs POST is aborted (sometimes multiple times). When it runs fast, the POST and subsequent POSTs run smoothly

Slow:
GET http://pocleaderboard.herokuapp.com/sockjs/info 200 OK 22ms
POST http://pocleaderboard.herokuapp.com/sockjs/029/su0d77fb/xhr Aborted
GET http://pocleaderboard.herokuapp.com/sockjs/info 200 OK 27ms
POST http://pocleaderboard.herokuapp.com/sockjs/132/uljqusxd/xhr Aborted
GET http://pocleaderboard.herokuapp.com/sockjs/info 200 OK 28ms
POST http://pocleaderboard.herokuapp.com/sockjs/154/kcbr6a5p/xhr Aborted

Fast(er):
GET http://pocleaderboard.herokuapp.com/sockjs/info 200 OK 1.08s
POST http://pocleaderboard.herokuapp.com/sockjs/755/xiggb555/xhr 200 OK 1.02s

Answer 1

Meteor gets loaded that fast locally, because it doesn't depend on your internet connection and the files can just be read from your harddrive and don't need to be downloaded. And once the data is loaded it's the same everywhere you host, because the client (you) perform all actions on your cached mongo database and then just wait for the server to say if the action was alright or not.

But for the Heroku loading times, I have no idea, Sorry!

UPDATE: These are the long-pulls from SockJS that is used by Meteor. Normally these pulls only get Aborted on a hot code push (when a file is added/changed/removed).

Either you or Heroku seem to write or change something in the directory. Because then a hot code push may be initiated by Meteor.