100DoTS Week 4 - Peaks & Limits
Hi everyone!
What started as a calm week for Chiffre took a busy turn on Friday. Not so much on the development or marketing front, I took some time off to focus on building my website and blog, but because my launch blog post got some traction on Twitter, and generated a lot of traffic, the largest sustained peak so far:
If you recall, last week I shared how I added Next.js metrics to my website, it turns out it was a great source of extra events, that for now are sitting on my account waiting for proper visualisation.
How did the backend take this ? Actually pretty well, nothing out of the ordinary:
In green is Push, the event collection service and in yellow is the main backend service.
However, this revealed some interesting performance issues on the frontend, that I'm planning to work on (read on for more). But first, some stats! 📊
Stats
Since last week, we had:
- +3 new users 👋
- +3 new projects 🎉
- +11 new followers on Twitter
For the first time, people joined without needing any manual intervention on my part, so that's a good progress! 😀
FAQ: Limits
After discussing with some users, the question of limits came up. Meaning: "what happens if I'm on the free plan and I get a traffic spike ? Is my analytics data gone forever ?"
No! Having a blog article trend on HackerNews, Twitter or your favourite social platform is a good surprise, and I would hate being the one ruining it with hard limits.
I'm planning on allowing 3 spike days per month where you are allowed more than your daily limit of events. After that, the limit will kick in and any extra data will be kept for 24 hours, to leave you time to upgrade your account.
Next Week's Backlog
I'm planning on doing some work on the webapp this week, to solve some performance issues raised by my Twitter experiment.
For the tech-savy readers: I'm going to move the data fetching and decryption into a WebWorker and have it run continuously in the background, rather than on the UI thread and only on projects views as it is now. This should make the UI much more responsive and allow to handle large traffic spikes in real time.
I also have started some plans to improve the time range selector, taking inspiration from Grafana, which I use to monitor Chiffre (the dark graph above):
That's it for this week, I'm looking forward to the next and discussing more with y'all about the future of the product.
See you soon, and take care.
François Best
Founder | Chiffre.io
PS: The signup link for the preview is still up, I might have to change it at some point 😅