Is it possible to use ScheduledExecutorService with Heroku

It is correct that, if you only run a single dyno web app, the web process will be stopped if they are not receiving any traffic. A scheduler thread that runs inside a web process should only do work related to the process itself, e.g clear out internal caches, etc. If you stick to this use case, you don't need the scheduler process if your whole web process has been idled out. If your scheduler does work outside of the web process, then we recommend that you factor it into a dedicated http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/run-non-web-java-processes-on-heroku and scale it to exactly one dyno (effectively a singleton process). Heroku will make sure the process is running, restarting it if it crashes, etc. The worker/clock process should do an infinite loop with a sleep call so it wakes up every X seconds and performs work. You will be charged a full dyno hour per hour you're running a worker process like this which is of course not always economical. If you only want to schedule something every 10 minutes or less frequently, you can use the http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scheduler which will only incur costs for the actual time it runs, not for the sleep time.