Hi Jon and Ikai,

I've been seeing crazy amounts of warmup requests all week. For
instance, while one request was being served, 5 to 7 instances started
up *simultaneously*, although there was no other load. Now, the *next*
request was almost guaranteed to hit one of the new instances, which
are warmed up, but not 100% hot... and thus takes a long time to
load... which spins up a few *new* instances.  The app used to have a
startup time of 5 to 6 seconds, and it used to respond within 400ms to
800ms, with only a few heavy pages being a lot slower. Not a lightning
fast app, but it worked really well before 1.5.2.  Now response times
have dropped by factor 3 to 5, which takes even normal requests into a
really awkward 2 to 3 second range. This has been plaguing the
application all week, and I had no clue what was going on.

I figured out that I needed to limit the the idle VMs to 3 to, so I'd
at least avoid having 3-7 new idle VMs per request and always hitting
luke-warm instances. That's better, but there is still an awful lot of
spinning up and spinning down going on, and every 3rd or 4th request
or so still goes to a "warm-but-not-hot" VM, taking 3 seconds or so.

I don't really care about the billing at the moment, but it is really
embarrassing me in front of our customers to have such a slow
application all of a sudden. I've been working the weekend on some
general profiling to mitigate, but please make this stop, or give us
more control so we can determine how soon a new instance is created
(in my case, not so soon...)

Does this also change the recommended approach to warmup-request in
general?  So far, I had only warmed the most crucial parts of the app,
since the doc states that requests may as well hit a cold instance,
and you wouldn't want to wait for 20s until really the entire app was
piping hot.  Instead of doing an extreme 20 seconds warm-up, the
instances would gradually hotten up with each new request coming in.
But now instances go up and down a lot, so each one is barely luke-
warm, and thus slower on average. I'd change the warmup sequence to
20s of heavy exercises if it helped,  but that would spin up even more
instances... oh dear. :)


Cheers,
Per

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