My business is scaling rapidly, and we handle millions of unique requests weekly. We're currently hosted on DigitalOcean, spending around €400 monthly on a setup that includes one small Redis server, four medium ARM nodes across two data centers, and a MySQL database with two replicas. However, we're encountering significant performance issues, particularly when it comes to blocking requests. If two users make concurrent requests, one will get delayed until the other completes, especially if it's a long operation. I initially thought this might be due to MySQL's transaction isolation level, but DigitalOcean doesn't allow changes to it.
We're lacking a scalable architecture and are not utilizing Kubernetes or any dynamic scaling methods, which is becoming a bottleneck as we grow.
We need to optimize our application code, primarily built on Symfony and MySQL, and improve our infrastructure. I'm looking for recommendations on cloud providers that offer reliable and scalable database hosting. Is migrating to PostgreSQL a significant challenge, and is it much faster than MySQL? Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated!
2 Answers
It’s critical to address app performance before changing your cloud setup. It’s unusual that just one request can block everything. Focus on finding the bottleneck first. Check PHP-FPM settings to ensure it's optimized for concurrency. Debugging might lead you to a solution without needing a new cloud provider.
Before switching providers, I suggest fixing your application issues first. If your existing code can’t handle the load, simply moving to a new cloud provider won't resolve that. Various providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP all have their pros and cons. Personally, I’d lean towards AWS or GCP based on my experiences, but definitely check your app code before making any big leaps.
That's good advice! We'll take a closer look at those settings.