Playframework 2.2 and Heroku: Unable to connect to non-Heroku database - mysql

Question

I have my database hosted somewhere else and I have this in my /conf file:
db.default.driver= com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
db.default.url="jdbc:mysql://myserver.com:3306/mydb"
db.default.user=myusername
db.default.password=mypassword
When I test it locally then it connects to the database just fine. I'm able to create/delete from the tables, etc. I changed the heroku config:
heroku config:add DATABASE_URL=mysql://myusername:mypassword#<myserver>:3306/mydb
and procfile
web: target/start -Dhttp.port=${PORT} ${JAVA_OPTS}
When I deploy it to heroku, I get errors:
2014-06-08T08:21:35.308207+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to crashed
2014-06-08T08:21:35.309586+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from crashed to starting
2014-06-08T08:21:33.996174+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Error R10 (Boot timeout) -> Web process failed to bind to $PORT within 60 seconds of launch
2014-06-08T08:21:33.996382+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Stopping process with SIGKILL
2014-06-08T08:21:35.293114+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Process exited with status 137
The error log is pretty long. Please let me know if you need further information. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

This is a shot in the dark, as there isn't any indication of issue in the logs, but I've faced similar "ghost" failures with Heroku.
It seems that there is a very large latency trying to leave their network, for whatever reason. While using an Apache Thrift RPC system on Heroku, nothing was working until I bumped the connection timeout to about 30 seconds. I saw intermittent failures with RabbitMQ (the Heroku add-on version), and their support told me to bump the connection timeout in this case as well.
Based on that, I would add this to your config file:
db.default.connectionTimeout=30 seconds