I am using new relic standard to prevent my heroku app from idling. It seems that it pings every minute or so. Will this slow my app in any significant way. Is there a way to make the pings occur less frequently? Is it significantly better to seek out an alternative like heroku scheduler? Thank you.
The New Relic Availability monitor will attempt to contact the URL you have specified roughly once every 2 minutes from 4 different sites. This will average out to about twice a minute. The pinger uses HEAD requests when possible, and GET requests otherwise so for a site with any appreciable load there shouldn't be significant effect.
The rate at which the site is contacted is not controllable by the user.