Hey @Bubbleboy, so if I’m understanding your concern, you’re worried that because you’re seeing brief periods of being maxed out while you’re still just developing your app and it’s just you with a little bit of test data, that means that it will be super-expensive to run your app at scale. Also, you’re wondering why you’re seeing this now and if anything has changed in the system.
I totally understand why this would concern you; you don’t want to invest a bunch of time in something and then find out it is not useable in the real world.
First, to answer your question about what changed: we’ve only been tracking and reporting capacity metrics for a month or two, and we very recently (over the weekend) released an email that notifies you if your app is sometimes hitting its limits. So capacity tracking is much more visible now than it was a while back. If your app is hitting capacity limits for very brief periods of time, you’re likely not going to notice it happening, since it’ll result in slight delays that are indistinguishable from the normal variability of your internet connection, your browser, etc. Now that we’ve released the new tracking features we’ve been getting a lot more questions about this because people notice that something is going on when otherwise they’d miss it.
Anyway, in answer to your concern, yes, if your graph is totally maxed out when it’s just you, you’re probably going to need to make major changes to your app. That’s not what I’m seeing on the graphs you and @jnbridges are posting, though. I’m seeing very brief, temporary periods where it is over.
Keep in mind that it’s not necessary to never hit capacity limits… if you just hit them briefly, things will run a tiny bit slower, but your site won’t totally break. The error messages people were seeing the other day I believe had to do with a couple temporary issues, including us not allocating enough capacity to our internal infrastructure.
The good news is that scaling up is not linear. Let me give you an analogy: imagine you have a house with one shower. Whenever someone uses a shower, your house’s showers are at their max capacity… if a second person wants to shower at the same time, they can’t. Imagine your house has 10 showers, though… even if you have 10 people in the house, you’re very unlikely to be at max capacity, since it is very unlikely all 10 people will want to shower at the exact same time. So just because you are hitting limits with one user and a small amount of capacity doesn’t mean you’ll hit limits with more users and more capacity.
We’ve seen this in practice. One of our users recently had their app featured on national television, and they were able to manage by scaling up to 20 units of capacity. So I know that it’s possible to run Bubble apps that get a ton of traffic.
Finally, as Emmanuel has mentioned in the thread, we’re building tools to help you find parts of your app that are using a lot of capacity, and expect to release them sometime in the next week. There are often multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing in Bubble (as there is in programming), and some of them can be much more efficient than others. So yes, you may need to make changes to your app as it scales, to eliminate things that are using too much capacity. We also may make changes on our end to make things more efficient as we see the data from these tools: we haven’t had much visibility into capacity usage in the past, so we expect to be able to make the Bubble platform faster and more efficient based on what we’re building.
I hope that helps give you the information you need to decide whether it’s worth continuing to invest in Bubble.