[redguava]

In answer to "who cares if the explanation comes today or tomorrow", I care if the explanation comes today or tomorrow. I use Heroku and have hit scaling issues in the last few weeks very similar to this. More information on what is going on behind the scenes will help me immediately.

As for discrepancy in documentation, this is one of the most major parts of their infrastructure and directly relates to how well applications scale. To claim they have intelligent routing and then not having so, that is completely misleading and not just a minor documentation discrepancy. This isn't a tech document that got out of date, this is straight from their main "how it works" page... http://www.heroku.com/how/scale. Read the bit on routing.

[bitcartel]

Well, for marketing purposes, random doesn't sound as impressive as intelligent. It's a discrepancy but it does appear to be disclosed.

On the page you link to, it says: "Incoming web traffic is automatically routed to web dynos, with intelligent distribution of load instantly as you scale."

When you click on "Read more about routing..." it says: "Request distribution - The routing mesh uses a random selection algorithm for HTTP request load balancing across web processes." https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-routing

[RobAley]

It may sound more impressive, but it's simply wrong. It's not even ambiguous.

If they had said some thing like "with advanced algorithmic distribution of load instantly as you scale", its wishy-washy enough that its technically correct and those that need to know exactly how it does it will need to go and look at the docs.

As it is, intelligent distribution tells those that need to know that the distribution of load is based on intelligence gathered from the system, so they may not look farther. And it's simply not true.

[imbriaco]

I'm really confused where people are coming up with the idea that the word "intelligent" is somehow a synonym for "queueing". That doesn't make any sense to me.

The intelligent part of it is that it knows which servers and ports your application is running on as dynos come and go, and the routers is updated in near real time to reflect these changes. Since dynos move about frequently, and there are a great many of them starting and stopping per second, this requires much more intelligence than you probably think.

[jacques_chester]

> random doesn't sound as impressive as intelligent

The impressive-sounding alternative is "stochastic".

[redguava]

@bitcartel (not sure why I couldn't reply to your comment)... I believe from my discussions with Heroku that the "random selection algorithm" is also not true.

[saraid216]

> (not sure why I couldn't reply to your comment)

FYI, this is probably because you saw his comment at around 0-1 minutes. If you click on "link", you'll get the Reply form... or refresh after a minute or two and the "reply" link will be available.

[redguava]

Thanks! Always wondered about that.