problems with heroku

[Jeffrey Kishner]

I have been running my river on one dyno (the free plan) and although I know it goes to sleep for 6 hours/day, my feeds have been regulary updating enough for me to be happy. However there have been no updates since 4:40pm yesterday. I've restarted the dyno, nothing has happened. I don't really want to pay the $7/mo to upgrade. Any ideas?

http://jkriver4.herokuapp.com

http://river.jeffreykishner.com

[Frank McPherson]

I was doing the same, and saw the same issues. What I observed is that if you didn't keep the Dashboard open (I think Heroku refers to that as the web dyno or something) then River4.js would seem to shutdown after about 30 minutes. According to the docs that Heroku provides, that appears to be the expected behavior, if there is no inbound web traffic for 30 minutes it assumes the app isn't being used so puts it to sleep. You might try opening the Dashboard first, then give it a few minutes and check to see if your River spins up. 

After mulling it over a bit, I decided to cancel a service I was paying $5 a month for and sight up for the hobby account, which I can always cancel if I change my mind down the road. I prefer an Internet-facing server implementation of River4 so I can access my river of news from any device, so if I switch off from Heroku, I'll probably buy another server at CloudAtCost.com and use the local file system configuration rather than the S3 config I use today. I "own" one virtual server at CloudAtCost to host fargoPublisher.js. Right now moving my River4 implementation is a little more work than I want to do. For $35 one time, I think CloudAtCost is nicely suited for something like River4. 

--
GitHub repository: https://github.com/scripting/river4
How to ask for help: http://scripting.com/2014/03/19/howToAskForHelpWithSoftware.html
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[Jeffrey Kishner]

I've been cheating by having pingability ping /serverdata on my herokuapp once per hour. But even so there seems to be a separate problem.

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[Andy Sylvester]

Jeffrey,

I am using a cron job to update my main river site (rivers.andysylvester.com) and an online cron service for a test site (rivertest.andysylvester.com). I checked both of them, and they appear to be updating.

I added the Papertrail addon to my test site, it helped me to debug some problems while using a web interface. I don't know if you are looking at your Heroku logs, but that is an easy way to do it, and there is a free option so it does not cost anything to get a quick look at what is happening with your app.

Let us know if you get some more data on your problem, that might help in debugging.

Andy Sylvester

[Jeffrey Kishner]

I added the "logentries" app to my Heroku app, they're difficult to read but I found that I had accidentally added a new feed starting with feed:// instead of http://

fixed that and my app is working again, so maybe that was the problem?

[Andy Sylvester]

Jeffrey,

That could definitely be a problem if River4 could not access the feed at the URL with feed at the front. I remember seeing some examples of feeds with that a few years ago, but not recently.

Andy Sylvester

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[Dave Winer]

Jeffrey, it won't read a feed with that prefix, but I don't think that should cause your whole River4 installation to stop working.

Regardless, I'll put a workaround in there for that, and change feed:// to http://.

Here's the little test app I wrote to find out what would happen.

var request = require ("request");

request ("feed://scripting.com/", function (error, response, body) {

if (!error && (response.statusCode == 200)) {

console.log (body.toString ());

}

else {

console.log (error.message);

}

});