FAQ
Does a sleeping app cost nothing?
Its instances cost nothing: they are stopped. Its add-ons (databases, Cellar buckets, Redis, etc.) are billed apart and keep running: the reaper only touches apps. See the Clever Cloud pricing.
How long does a wake up take?
The time Clever Cloud takes to start the app: from about thirty seconds for a small Node.js or Go
app to several minutes for an app that builds on start. Plus up to five seconds for the reaper to
notice it is up, plus the ready delay of the route (3 seconds by default). The history of the app
shows how long its wake ups take: the time between Down → WaitingForUp and WaitingForUp → Up.
Does the reaper rebuild my app when it wakes it up?
It asks Clever Cloud to start the app's instances, like Start in the Clever Cloud console. Whether that reuses the last build or rebuilds from the last commit depends on the app's build cache settings on Clever Cloud.
Can a sleeping app run cron jobs or consume a queue?
No: a stopped app does nothing. If an app has scheduled work, give it a must-be-up range around it, or keep it out of the reaper.
Can I put an app to sleep that has no route in Otoroshi?
No. The reaper measures traffic through routes, and wakes apps up through them: an app with no route would never wake up.
Can I put Otoroshi itself under the reaper?
No: once asleep, nothing would wake it up.
What happens to WebSockets and long-lived connections?
They are traffic when they open. A WebSocket that stays open for hours without new requests does not refresh the last access: give such apps a grace period longer than their sessions, or keep them out of the reaper.
What about POST requests on a sleeping app?
In hold mode they are held like any other request, body included, and forwarded once the app is up.
In unavailable mode they get a 503 and the client has to retry. A browser form POST is not a
browser request in the reaper's sense (only GET and HEAD are): it gets the mode of the route.
Do crawlers keep my apps awake?
If they reach them, yes: a crawl is traffic. Block them before the reaper (a robots.txt, an
authentication plugin, a bot management plugin), or add a user_agent
monitoring filter for them.
Can several Otoroshi clusters manage the same app?
They would not know about each other: one cluster could put an app to sleep while the other still routes traffic to it. The next request on the other cluster would wake it up again, so nothing breaks, but the apps would sleep less than they should. Manage each app from one cluster.
The app is managed by several routes with different settings. Which win?
The most demanding: the longest grace period, the longest fail timeout, and every must-be-up range of every route. See Several routes, one app.
What does the reaper store about my traffic?
Only the date of the last request per app. No path, no IP address, no header.
Is there an equivalent for apps that are not on Clever Cloud?
Not in this extension: it relies on the Clever Cloud API to stop and start apps.