Twice The Fun

A Node.js app providing a web service is frequently crashing on Heroku.

Debugging

An app can be debugged locally with the Chrome developer tools at chrome://inspect/#devices :

$ PORT=3333 node --inspect index.js
Debugger listening on ws://127.0.0.1:9229/9a383ec6-822b-476f-8df5-8beeb8acb279
For help, see: https://nodejs.org/en/docs/inspector

It runs okay on the local machine, but given the exact same input parameters, it fails when live.

Scaling

The types of Heroku app are:

• Eco and Basic
• Production
• Advanced
• Enterprise

Given that it is a Production app, there are two ways to scale:

1. Horizontal: Adding new Dynos (this increases the ability to handle concurrent connections)
2. Vertical: Increasing the processing and memory capacity of each (or the one) Dyno

The following command will apply the latter, from the Heroku CLI:

$ heroku ps:type web=standard-2x --app=myappname

This gives the app more leeway in terms of what resources it can use, so would hopefully reduce how often it crashes. Looking at the code itself, and making it more efficient could also help.

Other Providers

Render is another contender for hosting a Node.js web service.

This file was updated at 2025-03-01 19:15:47