"Reserved server capacity" vs "capacity boost"?

[laurence]

My app at the point that I’ll bring on alpha testers starting this week.

In my testing, there have been times when the debugger reports that I could have had better performance with added capacity. With more people being added to the pool of users, I’m wondering if there would be value to me in upgrading to the Professional level to get “reserved server capacity”.

To me, that’s a vague term. I’m unclear on when slow performance is because the app exceeded capacity in some way and when it’s just that as a Personal user, I’m not necessarily receiving the capacity I get at other times.

Is there a clear, unequivocal explanation of what reserved server capacity means and how it affects performance? Right now, the server capacity usage chart rarely shows high CPU usage even when things seem to be running slowly.

[andrewgassen]

@keith had a good write up/hypothesis about these two concepts a while ago on the forum. There wasn’t a clear response from the team, but it might be worth a read if you haven’t already.

Basic Performance Issue: Professional Plan(s), Reserved Capacity, and Time-to-First-Anything-Throttling

Hi @neerja, I could certainly provide a copy of my app as it exists today, I suppose. But note that of course the behavior I’m describing really only happens with apps that are in production/in use and are consuming Bubble resources. As far as what happens with my particular app (this is the GRUPZ app that I’ve shared with you terrific support folks in the past when I’ve had bug reports), the Logs tab from today is a pretty good illustration: [image] What we’re looking at here is the past 2…

[laurence]

Thanks, Andrew.

I will have to reread it because I’m still confounded. and Keith’s final post doesn’t help:

“It’s just one of those things that’s very odd feeling as I certainly didn’t observe laggy web server performance until I moved to a reserved capacity plan.”

It’s especially disconcerting that apparent performance may get worse with reserved capacity, and as developers, we don’t have a reliable way to get a handle on how to maintain acceptable performance.

I would like to know that paying for Professional level service will give better and more consistent performance than I’m currently seeing on the Personal plan. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Did I misinterpret something?

[andrewgassen]

I believe the conclusion is that reserved capacity will give more consistent performance, but not necessarily “better” performance.

My takeaway from the thread was the Personal or Hobby plans may fluctuate from 10 miles per hour to 100 miles per hour, but reserved capacity plans run at a steady 55 miles per hour, unless you buy extra capacity, but there’s no way of knowing for sure until you actually do it.

[laurence]

Thanks for that clarification of a fuzzy topic. I’ll be happier with steadier performance. I believe that will make it easier to focus on optimizing the app for that environment.