[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".