In a previous post, I’ve covered how I used Digital Ocean’s load balancer to handle the increasing number of request my Weather Extension receives. For weeks everything was going great but about a month ago I started having issues with DO load balancer. Users were receiving 522 (timeouts) errors. DO claimed my servers were the issue. After some testing, I realized that around 1,000 requests a minute, Digital Ocean’s load balancer started failing even though they claim to not limit the number of requests. Read More
Category: Side Project

DigitalOcean Load Balancers
Performance and reliability are two key factors that contribute to a user being happy when using a website/app. They tend to not be forgiving when a website fails to load especially when it comes to browser extensions. If it doesn’t work the first time, they often uninstall. Read More

How to Market Browser Extensions
For the past year and a half I’ve been testing different ways to market my Weather Extension. Currently Weather has over 125,000 users. Here are some of the strategies that have worked well for me: Read More

Ways to Improve Laravel Performance
Over the past few months my Weather Extension has grown to over 118,000+ users and averages 14 req/sec. Weather uses Laravel primarily as an api and VueJs to render the html. Speed is very important. Currently Weather is hosted on a $40 a month Digital Ocean server. Since Weather is free, I’ve tried my best to keep cost low. Here are a few changes I’ve made to improve the performance of my Laravel app. Read More