AuraDB + Neomodel + Django + Heroku and "Unable to retrieve routing information" after 10 minutes of live site running

Using Django Deployment
1

I’m doing fullstack development on my home machine but I also have a (private) github repository which is connected to Heroku. I am generally happy with Heroku as a host except the title.

The site runs fine, then after about 10minutes of testing out the embedded quiver editor, it freaks out and the database goes away. Here is the tail of my Heroku log:

2025-07-22T06:11:42.677961+00:00 app[web.1]: self._connect(self._config.default_access_mode)
2025-07-22T06:11:42.677961+00:00 app[web.1]: File “/app/.heroku/python/lib/python3.12/site-packages/neo4j/_sync/work/session.py”, line 130, in _connect
2025-07-22T06:11:42.677961+00:00 app[web.1]: super()._connect(
2025-07-22T06:11:42.677962+00:00 app[web.1]: File “/app/.heroku/python/lib/python3.12/site-packages/neo4j/_sync/work/workspace.py”, line 161, in _connect
2025-07-22T06:11:42.677962+00:00 app[web.1]: self._pool.update_routing_table(
2025-07-22T06:11:42.677962+00:00 app[web.1]: File “/app/.heroku/python/lib/python3.12/site-packages/neo4j/_sync/io/_pool.py”, line 802, in update_routing_table
2025-07-22T06:11:42.677962+00:00 app[web.1]: raise ServiceUnavailable(“Unable to retrieve routing information”)
2025-07-22T06:11:42.677963+00:00 app[web.1]: neo4j.exceptions.ServiceUnavailable: Unable to retrieve routing information
2025-07-22T06:11:42.678480+00:00 app[web.1]: 10.1.88.200 - - [22/Jul/2025:06:11:42 +0000] “GET /db/edit-content/af1175584d7d43e7bbcc2b44f5733144 HTTP/1.1” 500 123663 “Sign In” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/138.0.0.0”
2025-07-22T06:11:42.679546+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path=“/db/edit-content/af1175584d7d43e7bbcc2b44f5733144” host=arrowglue-dd35800b80e8.herokuapp.com request_id=a34f2b84-303d-9359-4443-f0d3d9855cf7 fwd=“98.97.140.210” dyno=web.1 connect=0ms service=121ms status=500 bytes=123663 protocol=http1.1 tls=true tls_version=unknown

This also seems to happen on the local side as well, I’ve been getting “Unable to retrieve the routing information” for a few days.

Anyone had this error? I don’t have it when working with Neo4j desktop (locally).

2

This might not be the best place to get this kind of support - this looks like a neo4j issue, rather than Django.

The use of _pool in the variables makes me think there’s some connection pooling or threading going on. When running locally, I’d make sure you’re running it identically (DEBUG, WSGI server etc). If you can, it might also be an idea to connect to the same neo4j instance you have running in Heroku, as that might also help debug the issue.

1 Like
3

@theorangeone the Neo4j forums told me the exact same thing: it’s a Heroku issue. I on my own accord figured since there’s no Heroku forums there’s 3 places to ask: here, Neo4j forums, Neomodel forums. I haven’t yet tried the last one.