The execution environment - dynos and the dyno manifold

A dyno is like a virtual UNIX container that can run any type of process on the dyno manifold. The dyno manifold is a process execution environment that facilitates the execution of various dynos, which might cater to different client requests. The following diagram shows the various components of the Heroku execution environment:

The dyno manifold infrastructure provides the necessary process management, isolation, scaling, routing, distribution, and redundancy required to run the production grade web and the worker processes in a resilient fashion.

The manifold is a fault-tolerant, distributed environment for your processes to run in full stream. If you release a new application version, the manifold manages the restart automatically, hence removing a lot of maintenance hassle. Dynos are recycled everyday or when resource constraints force dyno migration or resizing. The manifold is responsible for automatically restarting any failed dynos. If the dynos fail again and again, the manifold doesn't immediately restart them but waits for a delta and then tries to restart them. You can try starting the processes manually using the heroku restart command.

You can set global parameters and certain configuration variables in the environment .profile file as it gets called before the manifold starts the dyno. Each dyno is self-contained in the sense that it runs a particular instance of a web or worker process and has access to sufficient resources to handle client requests.

The dyno does have some restrictions in terms of the memory it can expend. There is a ceiling of 512 MB per dyno, exceeding which causes the process to log memory overuse warnings in the log file. If the memory exceeds a threshold of 1.5 GB per dyno, the dyno is rebooted with a Heroku error. Usually, it is recommended to design and size your application to use a maximum of 512 MB memory. If the application exceeds this limit, there is potentially a memory leak.

Dynos can serve many requests per second, but this depends greatly on the language and framework used. A multithreaded or event-driven environment such as Java or Node.js is designed to handle many requests concurrently.

Dynos execute in complete isolation and protection from one another, even when they are on the same physical hardware. Each dyno has (albeit virtually) its own filesystem, memory, and CPU that it can use to handle its own client requests.

Dynos could be running in a distributed infrastructure. The access and routing is managed by the routing mesh internally and usually none of the dynos are statically addressable.

Dynos use LXC (lxc.sourceforget.net) as the foundation to provide a lightweight UNIX container-like behavior to execute different processes in complete isolation.