[tvladeck]

It doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient RG was with their Rails app. It's almost certainly true that they could have done things better on their end, and their performance penalty wouldn't have been as severe -- but that really is not the point.

The point is that one company promised a level of service with their product that they did not deliver, and the difference was significant and persistent. The fact that the consumer could have used the product more efficiently is immaterial to that fact.

Other things that don't matter:

-that RG could/should move to another provider. That is of course their choice now, but it does not change the money they've spent and wasted with Heroku.

-that the routing problem is hard. If anything this makes it worse - it's a hard problem so people would pay a lot of money for a solution. What matters is that Heroku claimed to solve it and did not.

-that other consumers of the product managed to figure this out before RG. Heroku was still advertising through their documentation that they offered a routing solution, and they did not make clear to their customers that a significant feature of their product was now different.

Furthermore, Heroku appeared to obfuscate this fact and shift blame to the customer during the time RG was trying to diagnose their issues.

Now, by attacking RG's tone, Heroku have employed argument-level DH2 [1], which at least according to pg is not even worth considering. They have at least acknowledged their mistake, but to me that means that by extension they have sold something that they did not deliver on. The only honest way to move forward is for Heroku to offer some kind of compensation to the customers that were affected.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

[DeepDuh]

Yes, the comment quality on HN seems to be quite bad when it comes to Heroku threads. Why do so many CS professionals appear to be attaching themselves emotionally to software tools? That's pretty much what I have to conclude if you can't admit that this PaaS provider has screwed up and deserves more scrutiny when deciding for the platform of your next project/migration.

Isn't one of the great things about the Software startup scene that we can decide freely on what tools to use? Except for very niche markets we always have alternatives, even if it means a bit more work on our sides.

[PommeDeTerre]

I'm not really certain why, but there is a much greater tendency for members of the Ruby community to get emotionally attached to certain tools or services, and to defend them unequivocally, even when this is completely unjustified.

I haven't seen this to such a high degree with any other programming language/platform/technology community. Yes, there are developers in these communities who do prefer certain tools, but they're generally reasonable when it comes to criticism of these tools, or the suggestion of using alternatives. It's much rarer to see this when dealing with Ruby developers.

On more than one occasion, I've witnessed several different Ruby developers yell and scream in meetings when told they can't use a particular library or framework. I've never seen this kind of reaction from the many Java, C#, C, C++, Fortran, COBOL, Ada, Perl or Python developers I've worked with over the years, for instance.

[benologist]

Everyone knows Heroku screwed up, there not much left to say about that part of this story... so then we get to the application.

[cbs]

there not much left to say about that part of this story... so then we get to the application.

If we're going to be bikeshedding, why bikeshed RapGeinus' rails app, surely Heroku's request routing is a more meaty and exciting problem to talk about? Or is it simply because rails is a known quantity it is easier to fling shit at RG for not having the foresight to make exactly the decisions that are obvious to people with hindsight and an incomplete view of their application?

[benologist]

Nobody's bikeshedding anything.... Heroku have admitted it's a real problem, they have begun addressing it and increasing visibility and awareness into it. There is no news or data being added at this point, it's just RG retelling the exact same story.

And the story includes an application where visible parts of a second are used to construct their pages one very slow request at a time (regardless of what Heroku adds) which is interesting for a lot of us because that's not how many other platforms work.