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I recently switched my Heroku app DNS setting from using A record at the apex to using CNAME record at www subdomain, because of the scenario outlined in this blog post: http://neilmiddleton.com/the-dangers-of-a-records-and-heroku/

Supposedly, this is "the right way" to do this. However, since I made the change, I have noticed my response time spiked from about 360ms on average to over 1,000ms.

Pingdom chart: http://stuff.stevepaulo.com/FV74

Is this a natural side effect of using CNAME records? Is there anything I can do to speed this up? Is the danger of using A records a whitchhunt, in which case, I should go back to hard-coded IP Addresses in A records?

Steve Paulo
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  • There is insufficient information in that graph to tell the cause of your problem. A breakdown of what each part of the request cycle contributes to the overall total is the bare minimum. – womble Apr 02 '12 at 22:42
  • And yet, I was able to get useful comments out of *other* users... – Steve Paulo Apr 03 '12 at 15:53
  • No, you got *one* general statement out of *one* other user, with no evidence of applicability to your specific situation. – womble Apr 03 '12 at 19:44

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CNAME look ups will require multiple DNS queries, i.e., www.example.com is a CNAME of www.domain.com, so now we look up www.domain.com, etc. It'll depend on the efficiency of your DNS and how many queries you wind up having to do.

Also, looking at the blog post, it should be pointed out that Heroku probably has More Magic than you have, in terms of mitigating DDOS on a particular IP. Heroku having the freedom to change DNS records probably adds very little to their mitigation techniques. You should probably do what Heroku tells you to do in their documentation at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains.

cjc
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