We have a Rails app on Heroku. We have 2 dynos.
We're noticing that the site is not loading today with frequency. Lots of Request timeouts. Also, assets in particular, which are also hosted on Heroku, don't completely load, or are very slow to load. In the logs we've noticed pingdom's GET requests. Any chance that's the culprit?
Can pingdom cause our site to be very very slow, thereby causing incomplete loading or request timeouts?
No, unless you've got Pingdom to poll a URL that is very intensive in its own right (for example: http://example.com/make_backup.php).
All monitoring services make a very simple HTTP request, get the reply, check the response headers, close the connection, and move on. Even if they made 10 requests a minute, there's no way your server should crumble under that kind of load.
Think about it another way: suppose Pingdom made 10 requests a minute (say), and you turned it off. If that improved capacity, it would take a handful of users to make your server crumble again. Therefore, there's a problem elsewhere in your setup.
