4 ms·

Yeah, but there is a point (about 1 hour, last I checked being a few months ago) where you start getting cold starts in Neon. You can call that being active the

Yeah, but there is a point (about 1 hour, last I checked being a few months ago) where you start getting cold starts in Neon. You can call that being active the whole time but CockroachDB doesn't have this problem. If I had to rank it: "Live" database > CockroachDB (few hundred ms) > NeonDB (2-3 seconds) > traditional cold start. This is just my impression and the data is made up but that is how it has felt as a user. So there are definitely levels of "scaling to zero"

tristan957 2y ago
When you scale something to 0, indeed there are issues with cold starts. On the Neon free tier, you will get a cold start if your database is inactive for 5 minutes (you can configure this value on paid plans). As an exercise, I decided to try for myself what my cold start time is + query round trip, on Neon's free tier. Note that I am in Austin connecting to us-east-2. $ time psql -c 'SELECT 1' 'postgresql://neondb_owner:<password>@<endpoint>.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/neondb?sslmode=require' Null display is "(null)". ?column? ---------- 1 (1 row) real 0m1.156s user 0m0.036s sys 0m0.020s You can't make a trend out of 1 data point, but thought I would provide it nonetheless.
skybrian 2y ago
Last year I was playing around with Neon and the cold starts were slow enough that I implemented a “Loading…” dialog box. I haven’t touched it in a year, but I tried it just now and it still works. Cold startup for the Deno Fresh instance and the database query were about 700ms each, assuming I interpreted my logs correctly. Subjectively, it’s slow enough that it’s worth putting up a dialog box, but it disappears fast enough that you don’t need a spinner or progress bar. A meta-refresh of one second seems good enough. (I’m in California but the demo uses an East Coast instance for Neon. I set it up that way because I wanted to know how it would feel.) Demo: https://postgres-counter-demo.deno.dev/ https://postgres-counter-demo.deno.dev/ Source code: https://github.com/skybrian/postgres-counter-demo/ https://github.com/skybrian/postgres-counter-demo/
- davidgomes 2y ago
  We also have this demo: https://neon.tech/demos/instant-postgres https://neon.tech/demos/instant-postgres (Neon Employee)

tristan957 2y ago

When you scale something to 0, indeed there are issues with cold starts. On the Neon free tier, you will get a cold start if your database is inactive for 5 minutes (you can configure this value on paid plans). As an exercise, I decided to try for myself what my cold start time is + query round trip, on Neon's free tier. Note that I am in Austin connecting to us-east-2. $ time psql -c 'SELECT 1' 'postgresql://neondb_owner:<password>@<endpoint>.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/neondb?sslmode=require' Null display is "(null)". ?column? ---------- 1 (1 row) real 0m1.156s user 0m0.036s sys 0m0.020s You can't make a trend out of 1 data point, but thought I would provide it nonetheless.

skybrian 2y ago

Last year I was playing around with Neon and the cold starts were slow enough that I implemented a “Loading…” dialog box. I haven’t touched it in a year, but I tried it just now and it still works. Cold startup for the Deno Fresh instance and the database query were about 700ms each, assuming I interpreted my logs correctly. Subjectively, it’s slow enough that it’s worth putting up a dialog box, but it disappears fast enough that you don’t need a spinner or progress bar. A meta-refresh of one second seems good enough. (I’m in California but the demo uses an East Coast instance for Neon. I set it up that way because I wanted to know how it would feel.) Demo: https://postgres-counter-demo.deno.dev/ https://postgres-counter-demo.deno.dev/ Source code: https://github.com/skybrian/postgres-counter-demo/ https://github.com/skybrian/postgres-counter-demo/

davidgomes 2y ago
We also have this demo: https://neon.tech/demos/instant-postgres https://neon.tech/demos/instant-postgres (Neon Employee)