Tried to deploy my first web app and it crashed in 3 minutes flat

I spent like 6 weeks building this little Flask project for tracking my reading habits, really proud of it. Deployed it on a free tier of Render last Tuesday and it just completely died when 4 people tried to use it at once. I thought I was ready since I followed a tutorial on YouTube from some guy named CodeWithDave. Turns out I had no idea about database connections or how to handle multiple users, it just timed out for everyone. Did I mess up by not learning about scaling before deploying, or is this just a normal beginner mistake everyone makes? Has anyone else had their first project fall apart like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

morganhayes19d ago

Happens to literally everyone dude, don't beat yourself up. I did the same thing with my first Rails app back in the day, had like 5 friends try to sign up and the whole thing just went blank on them. The big lesson here is that local dev and production are totally different worlds, especially with free tiers that have super tight resources. You probably need to look into connection pooling for your database and maybe set up some basic caching so it's not hitting the server on every single page load. Honestly just getting it out there and watching it break teaches you way more than following any tutorial ever will.

black.laura18d ago

Have you ever looked into how some of the bigger apps handle this stuff? I was reading about something called "connection pooling" a while back, and it sounded like it's basically a way to share your database connections so they don't get exhausted. Your friends hitting the site is like a stress test, it's way different than your one browser running locally. I bet you could throw a simple caching layer like Redis in front of the main page and it would handle way more traffic without breaking.