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I know this may sound like an advertising but I must share the experience. My website started getting some traction lately. Like 20 times more visitors per day and 20k hits per day. I had only 2 workers at the time and I've noticed on Google Analytics that the average time to return a page was 3 seconds !

One short and sweet email communication with Glenn and literally 10 seconds later (modifed the settings of my account) - now I have 6 workers. The additional cost is $1.5 per worker so I've added 4 workers at the cost of another $6 per month.

The result: Testing it on production / live - it is as fast as running the whole thing locally! Unbelievable FAST.

I know adding workers to a badly written app will not help with performance, but still for all the others out there who are just as good as the other guy - try adding some workers to your app and maybe you'll experience the same magic I did. It is definitely worth trying.

Thanks Glenn !

Glad we could help :-)

As some background -- each request that comes into your web site is handled by one of your worker processes. If the worker is busy, incoming requests are queued up and processed in the order they arrived. If you have one worker and it takes, say, a second to process each request, and two requests come in together, then the first to arrive will be processed and will get its response a second later, and the second will get its answer a second after that -- so, after two seconds total. But in the same situation but with two workers, the two requests will be processed in parallel and they'll both get their response after one second.

Of course, in the real world, most requests take significantly less than a second. But if you have sufficient concurrent requests coming in, then the workers can get backed up processing them, and things slow down. In general, if your site starts slowing down as the number of visitors increases, then adding workers will almost certainly make it faster. But if your site is slow with only one person browsing it, you'll need to look at your code for reasons why.

We're planning to add a new chart sometime showing utilisation of your worker threads, which may help working out when and if it's worth adding new workers. Maybe also email alerts so that you're told when your app starts getting backed up. Let us know on this forum thread if you'd be interested in that :-)

Hi, could you help me to find out how do I add workers to my account? Thank you.

If you visit your accounts page, you can click "Customize this plan", and then adjust your number of workers to exactly the number you want. It takes effect immediately (or at least, as soon as you restart your web apps), and we adjust your billing in the following month...

We're planning to add a new chart sometime showing utilisation of your worker threads, which may help working out when and if it's worth adding new workers. Maybe also email alerts so that you're told when your app starts getting backed up. Let us know on this forum thread if you'd be interested in that :-)

If this is still in the works (or is already done, and I'm not aware of it), I'd certainly be interested in using this feature!

It is still on its way.