On scaling

I’ve been using PythonAnywhere to host web projects for some time now, and while I am very happy with the service, one of its weak points is scalability. This is especially problematic when trying to handle unpredictable spikes in traffic. While there are plenty of platforms that will scale seamlessly along with your traffic, PA is not one of these. With PA, you statically set the number of web workers that will serve up your pages. Not only is this number fixed, but it is the same across all of your various projects. This is less than ideal. I haven’t yet been burned by not having enough web workers, although this seems quite possible. On the other hand, I also don’t want to waste money by buying idle resources. For now – or until I can think of something better – my solution is to keep an eye on it and try to strike the right balance.

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One Comment

  1. Posted August 10, 2020 at 1:34 pm | Permalink

    Of course shortly after I posted this, I had a spike in traffic that overwhelmed my web workers. Sigh. I will have to come up with a better way to manage this.

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