AppHarbor hardware environment

Question

Is it possible to find out how much memory an appharbor instance has available to it?

The reason I ask is that I have a site which does heavy data transformation to create reports on the fly. I am finding that the same reports in my AppHarbor instance perform 3 to 4 times worse compared to my development environment. This is running the same computations over the same data set. Specifically, reports which take 4 seconds to run in development take about 15 seconds on AppHarbor.

To make it worse I am developing in a Parallel's VM restricted to 2GB memory on a Macbook Air - not exactly a workhorse development environment.

My AppHarbor instance has the ambiguously named "2 workers per unit" at the moment.

So my question is .. what are the actual specs I am running on, and would there be any recommendations for improving it?

Answer 1

You can find the current resource allocations and limits for a worker unit in the program policy. These are subject to change, but currently a worker unit include 512MB RAM. This means you can get up to 2GB RAM per worker by scaling vertically.

It's not clear from your question whether you're using web workers to generate these reports, but I'd also recommend using AppHarbor's background workers to execute these workloads.