Issues with Timeouts (H12 on Heroku)

Questions / Help
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1

Hey everyone! So, my team has been experiencing an increase of timeouts from our Heroku dynos and I’ve been playing around with some ideas, and would love your guys’ opinions!

So, my first question is if we create several gen servers for some heavier processing, as the requests continue to hit the endpoints that use these gen servers will the gen server spawn more processes to handle the load, or will it just queue up the other requests?

Another question I have is if we are using Task.start_link in multiple places throughout our application, if it fails during the start_link, will the response timeout and begin pooling up several stale processes in the app?

Thank you for the advice! =)

2

If by gen server you mean the http server? It spawns a new process for every request, so some slow requests will not throttle others that way. The way they ‘can’ throttle is if you have a single or limited set of gen servers somewhere, like a database connection, say it pools 20 connections, but 20 people start 20 very very long DB requests, then everyone else has to wait for those to finish, as one example. ^.^