Keep your Appharbor site alive using your old Linux box
Appharbor.com is a great service. It allows you to create an ASP.NET web app using MVC 4 or other versions of ASP and configure it, so that a simple commit to a github(*) repository automatically compiles and deploys your app to appharbor. I might write up an article on how to do this at some point.
One thing I noticed is that after 20 minutes of inactivity, your application is being stopped on the server and the next access can take a bit longer as it needs to be restarted. With my demo app tkglaser.apphb.com the initial load time could be up to 20s. This is normal IIS behaviour.
One possible solution is to continuously ping your app to simulate activity. As the linked article suggests, this can be done by using paid services such as Pingdom or StillAlive.
If you have (like me) a little Linux box at home, which is running all the time, there is a much simpler and cheaper solution. You can set up a cron job and use curl to retrieve a page from your app every minute. Here is how to do it:
- Become root:
sudo su - - Edit your crontab:
crontab -e - Add this line:
* * * * * curl mywebsite.apphb.com - Save and close
You can check that it’s working by watching the syslog:
tail -f /var/log/syslog
Disclaimer: Some commands might be subtly different depending on your flavour of Linux. I’m using Ubuntu.
Pinging the app every minute might be a bit of a brute force solution but it worked perfectly for me, no more waiting times after some inactivity.
(*) Appharbor supports other services as well, not just github. Go to appharbor.com to learn more.
Thomas Glaser
