Turboku - The Art Of Faster Heroku Apps

Summary

Turboku is a migration path that automatically turns Heroku web dynos into Fly applications, addressing how existing Heroku apps can move to Fly’s globally distributed edge network. Fly routes requests to the closest datacenter through one global IP address, or two with IPv6, while TLS terminates closer to users and modern ECDSA certificates are automatic for Fly domains. A benchmark around the world used an existing application to compare Heroku and Fly connection stages, full requests, and cached requests. Fly reduced DNS, TCP, TLS, network, and full-request times, with the largest reported improvement appearing when caching was used: 180.16 ms versus Heroku’s 817.75 ms, a 77.91% reduction; uncached full requests fell 35.39%, while TTFB was 1.24% higher.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Turboku converts Heroku web dynos into Fly applications automatically, allowing them to deploy to Fly’s global edge network.

2. 2

   Fly’s benchmark reduced TLS time from 225.28 ms to 33.41 ms and network time from 353.68 ms to 58.53 ms.

3. 3

   With caching enabled, the measured request time was 180.16 ms on Fly versus 817.75 ms on Heroku; uncached TTFB was slightly higher on Fly.