Topic on Talk:VisualEditor/Installation on a shared host

Free Heroku apps are sufficient. The only limitation is that after one hour of not being used, free Heroku apps go to sleep and take a few extra seconds to awaken. If you want to avoid this, you need to hire a Heroku dyno (USD 7 per month).

Hello,

Before going further and trying this install procedure, I wanted to know how sufficient the free version of heroku is. I am not used to Heroku so am not sure I am able to understand the pricing information.

The free version comes with "a monthly pool of 1000 Free dyno hours; unverified accounts receive 550. When a Free dyno is active, it draws from the pool; your free apps can run as long as there are dyno hours left in your monthly pool."

Based on a daily usage of 6 hours (will definitely be less), for 5 days a week and 4 weeks a month, I need 5 * 4 * 6 = 120 hours. So the 1000 hours a month are quite enough., am I right ?

Am I right or is this not the correct way of counting things on heroku ?

And regarding the CPU power, is 512 MB ram; 1 web/1 worker enough or will it be slow ? The project won't serve lot of people but I need it to be reactive for people using it.

Thanks.

A couple of problems that I came across in the past were that, free dynos sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity which although helps in conserving the free hours, creates the problem that the user who will "wake" the dynos will face connection errors and will have to retry a couple of times before the Visual Editor finally works.

Another issue is that, if you are using this method of VisualEditor installation, it means you are probably using Shared Hosting. In this scenario using VisualEditor on large pages (like hundreds of kilobytes large), you are likely to end up crossing over the system resources limit of your host.

Would it be possible to create some kind of very light task (something that takes seconds), and have a cronjob that run every 25 minutes, so the dyno never sleeps?

Maybe using the VisualEditor related API, can't say how it could be done though.